Spectre - getting rid of the broker?

Spectre - speculative tokenised trading exchange - get rid of the human broker

I just saw two very interesting talks with the CEO of spectre, a blockchain based broker - less financial trading platform. So basically spectre is a platform for individuals to trade as they like, but without a third party involved. Which - maybe the main selling point - makes you responsible for your trades directly without anyone messing around with your money. Wow, another step to a fair financial world. But let's have a closer look.

Spectre - the idea

Spectre wants to make trading as a 'digital' or 'binary option' easy for every day traders by making price predictions through financial market research based knowledge. But instead of a broker doing the work for you, educating you how to read charts or advising you in what to buy or sell, spectre wants to tokenize the broker. How? Spectre as a trading platform has an digital liquidity pool. This pool is owned by ICO holders. The trader deposits his funds and can trade them. Because the pool is decentralised, no one can access these funds expect the trader himself. 2% fee is charged for the exchange, 2% as dividends for dividend token holder (so yes, there is two different kinds of token, a dividend token and a utility token). So the trader is responsible for his trading. Once traded, he can withdraw his assets based on the ethereum blockchain network. The pool is run by a smart contract. If you win, you gain 75 to 91%, if you loose, you loose.

The Team

Their team is a group of 10 people with various degrees in marketing, computer science, decision science, program management, etc. graduated from various universities from all the U.S. and the U.K. Many team members previously worked for blueskybinary.com, a trading education platform community with the mission to help people trade profitably. Their team overall sounds solid and legit.

Critics

The CEO, Kay Khemani worked for JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. He did, its true, but he didn't work there as a broker, he mentioned in an e-mail that he was working more in research than playing the "dangerous" game.

Further there were some complains about the education platform (blueskybinary) the CEOs were working for. It was said, that their trading signal system would, after a test of trading for several hours a day, only make a 51.65 % right choices, which is not really a great gain. Some of the signals were even buy and sell for the same asset at the same time. Amongst other ciritcs, like hiring uncertified people to teach other how to trade. I also found out, that they say it is free, but after a 0.001 payment for the first week, you pay 49.99 every month. However, I tried to find the person behind the article, a guy named John Novak. He posted several posts about scams in the cryptospace. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out, which John Novak it is, so I can't say more about his background and reasons to write this article. blueskybinary critic

Because, on the other hand, there is also this article about how good blueskybinary is. Saying it is one of the best trader education platforms, it has a ITM rate of 65 % and there is no need to sign up with a broker. James, the author behind the article, is another author of scam alerts, but on a different website.He works for forex in australia and posted a bit on quora.
Anyhow, the overall question is, if we can trust any of those binary option websites talking about helping you to make a lot of money. A nice article I found : binary option scam

In the end, I can't tell you, weather this is an ICO to invest in. The interviews are very interesting, Kay replied on an e-mail within hours and the overall project looks really good. Good whitepaper, solid team, cool website. Nevertheless, I stay sceptical, as of the background of the CEOs and their links to blueskybinary. Let me know, what you think.
Thanks for reading. Have a great day.

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