FXTimes Review – The good and the bad

Following Michael Greenberg’s report on the launch of FXTimes, I checked it out. FXTimes is a new forex portal by a forex broker – CMS Forex. Here’s a review on the good and bad features of this new forex portal.

First of all, read Michael’s analysis about this new portal. He has a very interesting point of view, regarding the cost-effectiveness of such a venture.  Now, here are my two cents:

FXTimes is well designed, The first thing your eye meets is the headline news – three rotating headlines, each one accompanied with a big colorful picture. A live chart of EUR/USD appears to the right and looks good.

The live quotes on the top are useful, but take the time to get used to. I didn’t notice them at a first glance.

Below, you can find articles in different fields: technical and fundamental commentaries and updates, live events and more. I found that the articles are short but well written, and accompanied by nice graphics.

In order to comment, you must have an account. It doesn’t really feel comfortable to register in a broker’s site just to comment. Even if they have a strict privacy policy, I still fear that they’ll refer to people that registered as potential leads for opening accounts.

The calendar is accompanied by a forex chart, and you can see the events on the graph. That’s a nice feature. On the other hand, I didn’t find an option to modify the time in the calendar. It isn’t comfortable to calculate the time difference to know when an event occurs. I still feel better with the calendar at Forex Factory.

FXTimes Calendar – click the image to enlarge.

The advertisements for CMS Forex, which are the main reason for building this portal, aren’t too intrusive. Maybe after gaining traction, they’ll increase the ad space.

All in all, FXTimes is OK. There are some good design elements and good features, alongside some shortcomings. For me, this isn’t good enough for using it on a regular basis. I prefer independent forex portals, which don’t have an agenda of getting traders to open accounts.

A forex portal that is powered by a broker should have some killer features so that I will use it constantly. FXTimes is good, but not good enough.