By Will Liu– 24 June 2020
What is Simon’s current profession?
Simon works as a senior account manager at Trademax, an up and coming forex broker with operations worldwide, having branch offices located in all key financial industry hot spots. Trademax’s main base of operation remains in the Asia-pacific region and has expanded since their founding in 2013, allowing clients to trade in global equities and precious metals, another aspect is they’re experimenting with a series of educational videos about forex trading, called iTrade.
As an account manager, Simon serves as the point of contact between clients and Trademax, enabling communication between them. Account managers strive to provide clients with a safe and comfortable trading environment, whilst simultaneously answering client queries regarding
platform operation and allaying their worries. Another part of his role includes mentoring a small team of junior account managers, by providing advice on how to relate with and develop their own client base and also occasionally holding mini seminars for them to further enrich and deepen their technical skills in forex trading which they can pass along to their clients to help them become more mature and confident traders.
What happens in the daily life of a senior account manager?
Simon’s main client base is situated within Asia as such due to time zone differences, thus when he arrives at the office, their days are just beginning, thus he doesn’t have to interact with them yet. However, despite the majority of his client base being inactive, this period of time in the morning is one of his busiest times of the workday. He explains a key part of an account managers duty is being aware of any new or upcoming news that can serve as fundamental impulse within the market. This caused some confusion for me as it seems to conflict with the relatively passive role of an account manager and more appropriate for a forex consultant who actively provides tailored trading advice for clients to increase profits. Simon explains this information isn’t to help clients make money instead to aid clients so that they are aware of possible, sudden moves in the forex market and the potential implications. Timely awareness of fundamental impulse helps clients make educated and independent decisions to set appropriate stop loss levels that are in accordance with their risk tolerance and capacity.
Following the collection of daily fundamental news, Simon will often have lunch with his clients, where they will have a casual conversation about their daily life. This conversation serves to build a more meaningful connection between them, so that clients will be more trusting towards
information provided by the account manager. After returning to the office, his afternoon is dominated by interacting with his client base through phone calls and social media. A common conversation is the evaluation of a trade that resulted in a loss. He will converse with client to identify any potential issues such as misunderstanding technical indicators or having a misbalanced take profit and stop loss ratio, thus helping to better educate the client so that they can develop as a forex trader. This activity interspersed with helping his junior traders by demonstrating the effective conveyance of technical concepts to their clients in layman terms before going home.
However, leaving the office doesn’t mark the end of the workday, as time zone differences mean Simon will continue his correspondence with is clients until after dinner, readily responding to queries and allaying his clients’ concerns.
How has the onset of the COVID 19 outbreak changed the daily life of an account manager? Have there been any unexpected effects of the change in work style?
A key impact of COVID 19 was the onset of panic within the global financial market, causing a downturn in most of the industry. However, the rapid devaluation of traditionally safe assets such as gold, coupled with the volatility of the equity market saw the diversion of funds towards forex trading, causing it to be one of the few sectors that has grown amidst the outbreak. Daily activity wise, because most of Simon’s communication weren’t in person, there wasn’t a significant change. However, with the increasingly widespread usages of virtual conference technology such as Zoom, more of his clients began using it. The inclusion of this virtual face to face communication enabled Simon to establish greater rapport with his client, leading to greater trust in his information. Greater market awareness coupled with an overall more cautious attitude, led to most of his clients setting more optimal stop loss levels thereby effectively insulating themselves from risk. This behaviour demonstrates how market volatility can be beneficial to the development of traders within the market.