Интересная статья про Ричарда Олсена и Oanda
http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/Olsen-oanda.html - короткая, но довольно много интересностей об Олсене, Мандельбро и их отношениях с рынком.
Пара-тройка цитат:
In 1974, at the age of 21, Olsen read about a government subsidy to save jobs, and he realized the headline could as easily have said the government bought 10,000 jobs, with the salary of those people as the price. "That got me thinking about what would happen if the government capitalized unemployment so people could invest in new jobs," he says.
That launched his nimble mind on a series of inquiries such as why some things become assets while others don't, and how come only some of those assets become tradable. That no one would listen to his ideas about flexibility in the job market got him wondering how many other obvious concepts were being missed.
It [торговая платформа Oanda FXTrade - RK] is, in short, a small-scale model of the real currency market. One problem with almost all economic or financial research is limited information. If you want to study a market, you can get lots of generic numbers -- indexes, price quotations, volume. If you are inside a brokerage house, you can supplement that with precise information about what your own clients are doing, and, to some extent, why. But you can never see what other firms' customers are doing. You can never get the whole picture, the satellite view. That is what Oanda.com provides Mr. Olsen and his handful of math and finance Ph.D.s: the insight, both general and particular, of what people actually do in a market.
As he sees it, in a well-functioning market small investors behave much like big investors, and make profits that scale proportionately. Only the industry's unfair commission structure and other idiosyncrasies tilt the game. Likewise, short-term traders act much like long-term investors -- again, with measurable scaling factors. He can see this, he says, in the computers tracking his Web service, FXTrade. There, fees are abolished and interest is compounded second by second; big and small investors are on an equal footing as they place their currency bets.