Ask most market traders to share the details of their order book and you’ll be lucky if they ever speak to you again.

The last thing professional traders want is for the rest of the market to know the detailed history of their trades, and the positions they currently hold.

But information sharing is becoming a valuable asset in the online retail trading world, and social network-driven trading sites are helping mainly non-professional investors get a foothold in these ultra-competitive markets. Online and mobile trading have driven growth in retail currency trading, which accounted for up to 10 percent of the $4 trillion-a-day FX market as of 2010, Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimates show.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/06/27/idUKL3E7HR1W020110627

When I first heard about these kinds of platforms being launched I thought they would be a failure. Firstly, I’m not a fan of facebook, but understood why it was successful – social networking was the hype, but then to combine that with trading? Why would traders share so much information like this? If you look at forums, traders discuss in general different methods, BUT, they hardly ever talk about their accounts in details. Ask any trader to show their trading log on an internet forum, and there’ll be havoc. Just don’t even go down there.

But for some reason new ventures like Currensee are managing to pull it off, and they have to be commended for that, albeit having a multi million dollar budget does help, somewhat.