A little while ago I was given a Demo of Macquarie Bank’s new share trading platform, Macquarie Edge, by their Head of Direct Investing, James Leplaw.

To be honest, based on my past experience with online trading platforms created by banks, I wasn’t expecting a lot. What I saw, however, blew me away.

Before starting development on Edge, Macquarie did a lot of research to find out what online investors really wanted in a share trading site.  They found the following:

• They seek access to quality market informatioon that is current and insightful
• They desire simple functionality without jargon
• They want access to experts and the views of others who they trust
• They want the option for personalisation and a tailored interface

That research makes sense, too. I mean, who wants jargon-filled, un-personalised information from randoms without credibility?

With an eye on the above research, Macquarie has worked hard to make sure that they can make as many of the 1.8 Million people with online accounts (that grew by 40% over the past 2 years BTW) happy, and they’ve certainly achieved it.

How have they done this? With a mix of Web 2.0 / Web 3.0 technologies that hasn’t just seen them jump into the market, it’s seen them jump over it in a way that will have the incumbents like Commsec struggling for years to catch up.

I spoke to Richard Slatter from Wotnews, whose semantic technology powers the news search and aggregation components of the site and he agreed:

“We’re really pleased with the final product and how our technology has been used by Macquarie to provide contextual information throughout the site.  On top of that, speed is of the essence in a trading site, so it’s really impressive to see the way that the Macquarie team has enabled so much functionality without sacrificing display times.”

He added:

“Credit should also go to the Macquarie team for deciding to go with a tech startup based on its merits rather than with a traditional news aggregator.”

I know what Slatter is saying here, but the truth is that when Macquarie decided to launch a leading-edge investment platform there was no other choice, in Australia at least, than to knock on Wotnews’ door.

So now we’ve gone over the high level stuff, let’s look at what’s about Edge in detail and what’s got me so impressed.

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NAVIGATION

Going through the site, the first noticeable thing is that contextual information is always available. If you’ve ever used another trading site you’ll notice how much you have to click around to get good information. That’s not the case here. For example, no matter where you are, when you have a trading account the buy/sell button is always available – a small thing but something that leading trading sites don’t feel the need to make available

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VISUALISATION

This is one of the best bits about the site. Everything from market depth to expert opinions to correlations between shares and industries is presented in an easy to understand way.

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RELEVANT CONTEXTUAL NEWS
This is where Wotnews’ semantic technology comes to the fore. Rather than just giving you a stream of company announcements or information directly related to a particular company, Edge is able to understand relationships between organisations, industries and news, so you get presented with the most relevant information possible. A simple example may be that rather than just displaying BHP Billiton news, the site also understand the relationship between Rio Tinto and BHP at the moment, so presents relevant information related to Rio as well.

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NEWS vs MOVEMENTS
In Edge you can map news/announcements onto a share price’s movements. I know Google has been doing this for a bit now , but the difference is that you can’t buy/sell shares in Google. By providing this service in Edge, Macquarie is becoming a one stop shop for all investment information.

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COMMUNITY
Turns out most people get their investment advice from friends and family. Macquarie have recognised this and have embedded some community features on the site which aim to help people better understand what investment decisions to make.

Their community strategy is actually 2-pronged.

First of all you can get  detailed information on what the total Edge community is doing - what shares they’re holding, which shares they’re watching etc.

However, Macquarie has taken this one step further and has included what are essentially private communities so you, and trusted friends/family, can form online groups to see what each other are trading/holding as well as to discuss stocks and other investment information.

(You’ll have to log in and become part of a community to see this one…

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There’s much more to Edge, too much to put into this one article, but you get the idea. The team have thought long and hard about creating the best tool possible with using modern technology and they’ve pretty much succeeded.

They’ve created a great way to aggregate disparate sources of information in an easy to understand fashion. They’ve created a great tool for educating people about investing and they’ve also managed to introduce some web 2.0/3.0 technology into the site to make it fun to use.

On that note, it’s great to hear the team’s dev path is centred on constant and frequent iteration (how Web 2.0 of them!). That’s just another example of how, despite the fact that Edge is owned by Australia’s largest investment bank, there’s nothing old-school in their approach.

If you want to have a poke around the site you can access almost all of the information as a guest – i.e. you don’t have to register. If you register and become a member you get a little more info and then when you’re ready to open a trading account (which is free, BTW) you get the full gamut of services.

If share trading is your thing, and even if it isn’t, this is a site that’s definitely worth checking out.