Celebrating our 25th Year in Business - The Sky is the Limit in the Next 25 Years
Founded in 1997, Online Trading Academy is celebrating its 25th year in business, over which time we have progressively emerged as a world leader in education and technology for retail traders and investors.
With the massive boom of retail investors entering the financial markets, OTA plays a pivotal role in helping educate both newcomers and seasoned traders alike. According to JD Power, more than 10 million new brokerage accounts were opened in 2020. The trend continues in 2021. According to Motley Fool, Charles Schwab who recently purchased TD Ameritrade, has opened nearly 5 million new accounts in the first half of 2021.
Eyal Shahar founded OTA nearly 25 years ago with a vision of helping everyday traders and investors level the playing field with Wall Street. From day one, he had a relentless commitment to helping average people enter the markets with the knowledge and skill they need to trade with confidence. In recent years we are seeing a rapid convergence of technology and education and we are on the forefront of that revolution.
Since 1997, OTA has served over 85,000 students with lifelong education so far, with on-location classes in over 35 education centers around the USA and the World (including Dubai, India, Singapore and students in many more countries) and thousands of hours of self-paced and online courses and live learning sessions through a leading edge student portal.
- Over that time we have collected over 200,000 post-class exit surveys averaging over a 94% satisfaction rating, which we post on our website real time every week.
- In the last full pre-pandemic year of normal operations in 2019, we conducted over 3,000 on-location classes and 10,000 online sessions with more than 2.5 million attendances by students, provided by over 60 talented instructors.
In 2019, Online Trading Academy introduced CliK which is the only integrated educational, analysis and trading platform on the market and has fully integrated OTA’s proprietary core strategy methodology which can be customized for each end-user based on how and what they trade and invest.
OTA has become a prolific award winner for a combination of its Edtech and Fintech innovation. Not least of all, the awards are rolling in for CliK, which is increasingly recognized as a revolutionary first of a kind, all-in-one integrated education, analysis and trading platform. In June 2021 CliK won the People’s Choice Stevie Award for Best Fintech Solution based upon a public vote with more than 92,000 votes being cast. Just this month, OTA also won two more bronze Stevie Awards for CliK in the categories of Best Achievement in Product Innovation and Best Fintech Solution.
With the scale and scope of deep learning experiences that we facilitate with our students, helping them build their skills, evolve their proficiency and develop their confidence with retail trading and investing, we may well already have emerged as not just a world leader but the world leader. Our development of CliK just accelerates our leadership position even further and we are only just getting started with what CliK makes possible on our development roadmap.
Also our OTA Research Center also helps curate research of retail traders and investors, in particular differentiating between those who are educated and those who are uneducated, a crucial difference which is often missed in the narrative. Research of our own students indicates very different insights from the prevailing 3rd party research. We look forward to the next 25 years of revolutionizing education, technology and support for retail traders and investors.
The sky is the limit.