February 17, 2023

How To Build a Stock Trading Platform Like E-Trade

Nowadays stock market traders are interested in applications and web pages that allow them to trade with a few taps on their smartphones. Developing an application will provide the market with a solution and make trading easier. This is a great opportunity to develop an app because the market and users have not yet seen a full-fledged trading application. You should create a cross-platform e-commerce app if you have great ideas about stock market app development. The blog post below gives you all the basic knowledge you need to create a stock market trading app.

What is a Trading App?

A stock trading platform is a computer system that is used to place orders (buy/sell) for financial products such as stocks, indices, futures, bonds, currencies, commodities, and derivatives with financial intermediaries such as brokerages, dealers, market makers, or stock exchanges on the Internet.

The best online brokers today offer dedicated mobile trading applications. Usually compatible with both iOS and Android devices, the best trading apps allow you to buy and sell financial instruments at the touch of a button. At the same time, choosing a trading application that meets your specific needs requires a lot of analytical work.

Trading Platform Types

There are many different trading platform types available, so we decided to divide them into two main groups.

Traditional-oriented type

This type of trading platform, such as ETFs, stocks, currencies, precious metals, etc. It allows you to make listed well-known investments. It is the most demanded group, as participants in the trading market want to deal with elements they understand well.

And of course, your custom trading software can have many assets.

Cryptocurrency-oriented type

The second group is specific and involves cryptocurrency trading in fintech. We believe that most of you have heard about Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, etc. This type of trading platform manages those assets: buying, selling, and different transactions.

Also, remember that there are two options to exchange cryptocurrency assets - with the participation of brokers, centralized, and decentralized. The 2nd type is the p2p model. There are many types of trading programs, and the best option is to develop a full-fledged mobile app or online platform to successfully participate in the investment business.

Your Competitors

In this blog post, we will describe how to create a trading app of a cryptocurrency-oriented type, but first, let’s look at your competitors.

ETrade

If you want your stock trading platform to succeed pay attention to ETrade. It is the best platform for stock trading with a long history.

ETrade Financial Corp. has over 30 years of history in the financial sector. The company specializes in investment solutions, trading, and trading in the stock market. Trading instruments: options, futures, stocks, ETFs, etc. The company is distinguished by the price-quality ratio in services and the constant search for innovations. But ETrade is not your only competitor, we advise you to study others.

Robinhood

Robinhood is a startup allowing trading on the stock exchange. The company has a convenient and easy-to-use mobile app. Thanks to him, investments became available to people who previously could not understand the financial markets due to many complex and incomprehensible details. The startup’s main audience is millennials. According to the company, the average age of customers is 31 years. And the most important advantage of Robinhood over classic brokers is the absence of commissions for trading.

eToro

eToro is an online social trading platform that allows you to follow the financial transactions of other users, copy them and make your transactions. eToro is a social trading service. The phenomenon of social trading itself is new for the private investor. This service allows novice traders to follow the best traders in the world and feel the support of the same novice users.

StockTwits

StockTwits is a real-time social messaging platform for traders and investors from anywhere in the world. Allows you to get instant access to professional analysis, news, trading ideas, and market sentiment for trending assets.

StockTwits is aimed at traders and investors who trade on the stock exchange. The platform is a professional community whose members can share advice and ideas on specific securities or the latest financial market news.

NetDania

The application offers customizable real-time data for 20,000 financial instruments, great charts for mobile devices and tablets, and an economic news calendar in 16 languages. You can also create your algorithms and alerts in the NetDania app and sync them to your desktop. All in all, this is a great trading app.

Key Features of the Stock Market App

Important Features of Stock Market Applications:

• Registration. It is a crucial part of an application to create a convenient and secure way to sign in. You can utilize many options like email and social media accounts, and even add biometric checks. Make sure your trading APIs have a good balance between security and a flawless login experience.
• Trade Monitoring: Ensure that when users place a trade, they can edit and view stock data to make the right decision.
• User Personal Data: You need to add a page where the user can enter personal data. Ensure that they can edit it.
• Transactions and payments. They use merchant APIs to allow the app user to buy and track funding.
• Deposit: The user must be able to check the status of deposits at any time.
• Search bar: Developing an effective search bar allows the client to conveniently search for information about the market.
• Analytics: for better decisions, users can analyze statistics and the result of each transaction. So, ensure your trading network has the appropriate tool.
• News Feed: news feed is beneficial to read the news at the right time, it allows you to buy stocks at low prices through the application.
• Filters to the search bar. Stock filters help users to navigate the stocks they want to find. Adding filters to trading APIs are important steps to simplify the user's life.
• Push Notifications: It is the best way to inform about new features or updates. Your market application or trading APIs better have a push notification button.

How to Make a Platform Like E-Trade

Developing a stock trading app or software requires a deep understanding of how it will work on different mobile devices.

Mobile site vs mobile app

If you want your trading platform to be mobile-friendly, you don't need to add new resources as the website resources work well on all mobile devices.

However, if you want to create a complete mobile application, you can add features that will provide additional assistance to customers. The app also simplifies user interaction.

Now everyone has mobile phones. This is why all investment trading apps have switched to mobile banking apps. So when you launch a trading platform, make sure you have a stock trading app rather than desktop trading software.

It is very important to have an onboard team to design and develop standard applications. Three important people should lead the stock trading app and development team. One is an experienced project manager with experience in finance and other related issues. The other is a professional IT architect in the development of your trading application. You need a business analyst who has extensive experience in finance.

Discovery phase

The Discovery phase is a preparatory stage before development and the first step from an abstract idea to the implementation of the plan. We will suggest the best way to implement your business idea or help you improve the finished product. Conducting the Discovery Phase reduces development costs by up to 46%.

Design

Design involves all related aspects to your project, including UX, technical feasibility, and budget. The goal of this phase is to build an initial design document that involves all these things together with their tasks/deliverables like wireframes or mockups.

Development

In this phase, engineers develop code for the project based on specifications. Here provide everything needed for testing before deployment. So there won't be any problems in performance issues due to the lack of resources during the implementation stage itself.

Developers also test their work to ensure it meets expectations before providing it to QA testers.

Testing

Testers, based on the requirements (SQA, SRS, DDS) and the finished product, check the quality of the software (Quality Control).

If deviations from the requirements/errors are found, they are issued in the form of defect reports, corrected, and rechecked. The process continues until the quality of the product is brought to an acceptable level.

Release

The release is the last stage before the client receives the product. Here all the client’s specifications are met with quality and functionality. In this phase, you will get feedback from the client and fix any issues that were found.

Support

After the launch of the product, it begins to develop, change, and be supplemented with new features. This is a crucial part of managing projects because it ensures that you can offer support for your customers even after your release date has passed.

How much does it Cost to Develop a Trading App?

There is no clear-cut reply because many factors affect the cost of cross-platform trading app development. The complexity of an app as well as its features may result in a price range between $30k and 200k.

To get a price estimation, there is an online price calculator. You can consider the following points:

• complexity and number of screens;
• the number of functions and features;
• development process details;
• approach to quality assurance;
• database qualities;
• 3rd party integrations;
• security protocols implementation;
• development team size and expertise.

Bottom Line

Development of an MVP of a basic stock trade platform like ETrade can take 3 to 6 months.

The cost of a mobile application is calculated individually depending on the business objectives and technical features of the product. We tried to show in the article what works can be included in the development and how this can affect the final cost. If you have an idea, just contact us, and Stfalcon will do everything at the highest level!