Forex is a relatively new industry growing at a viral speed throughout the internet so any website spawned within it tends to age rapidly, for better or worse. The "old" Razor website was born in 2007 and went unmaintained for years, becoming like an old man, bent over and hobbling.  Behind the scenes however, a lengthy and arduous process was underway to outfit the old man with a new body. Wheeled into an operating room of creative visionaries and developers, old organs were removed and replaced with features unique and powerful. As traders we noticed that there were free tools lacking in the industry, or at least lacking in the way we imagined they should be, and we set out to create and consolidate these tools into one place, one website.

A great deal of time and sweat equity later, Razor is ready to roll out for beta testing, minus some major and minor features being held back for now.  Six major features we are happy to present today are detailed below.

• Razor Stats  view sample account page
  Razor stats is not the first tool to connect with, analyze, and publish your trading statistics, but is enhanced to place immense emphasis on accuracy and transparency while remaining seamless and easy to use.  Besides profitability, the other major component of statistical analysis is risk analytics based on reliable and accurate historical equity, and this is where we felt other systems fell down entirely.  We were initially confused when we viewed the so-called equity graphs of websites representing historical equity, since equity cannot possibly be accurately plotted as a single line and is in fact a range of values.  What we learned is that the websites we viewed used oversimplified methodologies that sometimes didn’t even attempt to reliably calculate historical equity, or if they did attempt the calculation it was based on a single data point such as end of day.  There is a good reason for all of this; the most accurate way of doing it is far more complex and the algorithms thousands of times more resource intensive to process.  The problem is that without accurate historical equity and drawdown metrics, risk cannot be properly assessed.  200 different metrics do not make up for the lacking of this one, and we certainly did not intend to build a system lacking in transparency.
  
  The primary goal when building Razor Stats was maximum precision and transparency.  Razor Stats reconstructs historical account equity using a large high-fidelity historical rate warehouse together with trade records, sophisticated algorithms and processes, and other essential data.  History-based metrics such as 'Drawdown' and equity graphs are precision-calculated by iterating through each moment for the life of the account, thus metrics are calculated reliably even for time periods before the account was added to Razor Stats.  From this huge amount of data, the stats system plots charts showing high and low values.  The main stats chart plots a graph of daily equity return high and low (expressed in ‘time-weighted return’ to eliminate the effects of deposits and withdrawals) to properly express the full range of historical equity values.
  
  
  
  
• Razor Economic Calendar  view
  Razor Calendar is the first global economic calendar to employ its own proprietary http 'push' technology to push data to the user browser immediately after data becomes available.  This technology is superior to the traditional web request architecture where users either request complete web pages or simple AJAX schemes where portions of a page are updated asynchronously based on user events or timers.  One advantage of employing this technology is that Razor Calendar is able to deliver data faster and more efficiently than other sources on the web.  Razor Calendar was built with the latency and accuracy sensitive trader in mind so the data is right in front of you, fast and easy to digest.
  
  The Razor calendar is always streaming so you don't need to refresh it, in fact doing so will only cause unnecessary delays.  When viewing the calendar, a new data window will open approximately 30 seconds before a scheduled data release and the data records will auto-update to the window for maximum readability.  You may suppress this popup window using the 'Streaming Update Window' button and allow data only to update via the main calendar grid.  Although the Razor calendar is designed to work with all recent versions of the 5 major internet browsers, we recommend Firefox as the optimal choice.
  
  
  
  
• Razor Economic Impact Analyzer  view
  Razor Economic Impact Analyzer provides traders with a fast and reliable method to research the impact a given economic event had on the market for each historical instance of the event.  This allows traders to make more informed trading decisions, such as when to close a position and stay out of the market due to the impending risk of large rate fluctuations, or conversely to get into the market at just the right time using surgical precision to capitalize on the inevitable fluctuations or 'spikes' as they have been so labeled.  
  
  Razor Economic Impact Charts offers a massive historical database of economic events along with historical pricing giving you research access rivaled only by expensive service subscriptions. You can quickly find the market event you wish to research by selecting the currency associated with the event and then selecting the event name. You may also change the currency pair to research how this event impacted different currency pairs.  Each economic event may have occurred at or around the same time of other events and it may be important to consider these as well.  Below the price chart you will find a list of all events that occurred at or about the time of the primary event you are researching.
  
  
  
  
• Social Profiles, Groups, Forums and Networking  view sample social profile  |  view sample social group
  The social terminology is thrown around pretty loosely these days.  Plenty of websites offer basic ‘friend’ and ‘like/vouching' type functionality and others offer quite a bit in the way of social trading, without also offering the tools for robust social interaction.   Social trading can have powerful uses, but the reality is most traders lose and thus a system that simply adopts the social networking norms and applies them to trading is more a hindrance than a help.  The Razor Social suite offers a full social profile with social wall and feed to display activities from your friends and groups along with photo albums and trading accounts.  Traders can create, moderate, and join social groups for special purposes like creating a club for trading a particular system or method.  Imagine a trader forming a group to trade only EURUSD or GBPUSD, using only technical analysis, or XYZ system.  Groups can be public or private, members may view each other’s trading account , moderator permissions may be assigned to non-group owners, and each group has its own internal group forum, social wall, and photo album.  No such feature set exists to date in the forex realm.
  
  
  
  
• Razor Editorial  view
  In the coming weeks and months Razor editorial will become a place with completely unique and interesting forex related content and market analysis.
  
  
• Forex Industry User Reviews   view
  There are loads of forex websites, brokers, systems, signals, books, and expert advisors out there, but how do you differentiate them?  How do you know how one might be better than the other? This is the point of Razor reviews, but under the hood Razor reviews is a little bit different. For starters, every review is hand moderated and analyzed for suspicious activity.  All reviewers must be Razor members, thus the astute researcher will give more credit to reviews left by active community members than one-off reviewers.  Additionally, the review system offers a unique level of granularity.  Ratings can be applied on a per category basis.  For instance, if ‘Sample Forex Company’ is in the 3 categories ‘Education’, ‘Signals’, and ‘VPS’ and they have poor VPS and signals but great education, the reviewer can write a glowing review of their education but only tick the box to apply their review to ‘Sample Forex Company’ for the ‘Education’ category.  ‘Sample Forex Company’ will not receive credit for this review in the other category listings.
  
  
• Facelift
  Along with all the new features Razor got a new look and a new logo icon!
  
  

As happy as we are to finally get some features out the door, we are humble enough to realize that everything is a work in progress and there are bound to be bugs and issues in Razor beta.  While we have many modifications and upgrades planned, and some are already completed and held back for release in the near future, we are grateful to hear from you on bugs, usability complaints, or any of the features you would like to see us tackle in the future.

Please, feel free to let us know what you think.  If you would like to receive updates to our blog simply click the blue subscribe button toward the top left of the article under the view profile button and you will receive email updates anytime we update our blog.

Thanks and happy trading!

The Razor Team

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