Future of Mataf

Mataf will enter adulthood by celebrating his 18th birthday this year.

Since 2003 I did a lot of experiments, and developed many tools. For the last five years I have worked on improving and stabilizing data feeds and calculations for tools (correlation, volatility, currency indices, value at risk, pivot points, pip value, etc...). This substantive work is exciting and has aroused increasing interest among traders. The number of traders using Mataf increased by 500% in 2020.

To give you an idea, today Mataf requires 16 servers to function properly. These servers are used to store data, perform numerous calculations in real time, display the site and distribute data feeds.

But I want to go further.

The plans for 2021 are ambitious. You sent me a lot of messages asking me to improve some services, all these messages are read and I try to answer all of them. As a matter of fact most of the requests are tremendously relevant and are landing in my non-stop growing to-do list.

For 2021 I plan to work on major improvements for the platform.

The first one is the addition of new timeframes. On Mataf I have been offering only 6 timeframes for a long time: 5 and 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, day, and week. I want to add: 1, 2 and 30 minutes, 2, 3, 6, 8 and 12 hours, and the monthly data.

The second project is the addition of crypto currencies. This is a big one. Maybe I should call them crypto assets I think about Bitcoin and Ethereum and probably a few more

Third project: Improving the stability of data feeds. Sometimes during the day I noticed that the data feeds are slow, I mean, really slow. I implemented new algorithms at the end of 2020 but there is still room for improvement. For me, it’s probably the most most important project because it’s frustrating when the chart doesn’t refresh.

Speaking of refresh, the fourth project is to bring auto refresh everywhere. Some charts, on the home page, on the tools like correlation or volatility, need a manual refresh. Not hitting F5 to update the numbers and charts would be a big step for mankind.

Fifth project: I want to send alerts by email or twitter and maybe text message (SMS, WhatsApp, telegram). We can have alerts on price levels, publication of news on the calendar, strong volatility, correlation level ... Well there's not limit on what we can do, it just has to be useful.

And finally, I’ll write use cases for all the tools and possibly making videos. I spend a lot of time in my email box explaining how the tools are working, a detailed user guide would help to understand all the features of the trading tools and save me some time.

These are my 6 projects for 2021, plus of course minor developments (like adding a button, changing a color, add a chart on a page...) all the usual maintenance (software update or server crash… which takes a lot of time) and my personal trading (because I trade, for real).

Adding time units and crypto currencies, as well as improving the stability of feeds will need to add a few servers to the 16 already existing.

Don't you see the bad news coming? It will have a significant cost. Currently the fixed running costs of Mataf are more or less 20,000 € per year ( that's 24 to 25 thousand US dollars with today's rate, 1.8 million Russian rubles or Indian rupees, 14 million Somali Shilling).

Historically Mataf is financed by advertising. Unfortunately the 2020 crisis, combined with my poor sales skills, led to a very sharp drop in revenue. As I do not want to overload the pages with advertising banners (and they are almost non-existent if you are connected) and I do not want to lose too much money, I need your financial help. I could have added a subscription, but I prefer, at least for now if it works, to keep all the access free and start a crowdfunding. The funding will go through a crowdfunding platform from which you can pay for a piece of server, and with many pieces of server I'll be able to build servers.

Mataf is an exciting project, I still have many ideas for the decade to come and the decade to follow. By 2030 (then 2040) I hope that more and more of you will be using the tools and still giving me some feedback.