FX Blue Labs' competition tracking software has been used by brokers and other trader-facing organisations such as education groups for a number of years and has been widely tested by retail traders via the www.fxblue.com web site. The competition technology is very flexible and can be branded to suit broker needs.

The competition process is as follows:

• Participants enroll on your website
• You send us a message containing the participant details
• We monitor each participant's account and calculate performance and a leaderboard
• You display the leaderboard on your website, using either pre-built widgets or by constructing your own display from our RSS or JSON feeds

FX Blue Labs can offer two options in order to attract additional participants to the competition:

• Include the competition on the www.fxblue.com website
• Send mailshots to the registered users of the www.fxblue.com website

Competitors' performance is monitored using the same account-sync technology which is used on the www.fxblue.com website.

For traditional demo-account competitions, where you create a new "disposable" demo account for use by each participant during the competition, we can support the following trading platforms: MT4, cTrader, xOpenHub, Vertex, FXCM TS2.

For live-account competitions, or competitions where participants can use an existing demo account rather than being given a new one, we need read-only access to the account details. (We are not prepared to receive or store credentials which would allow us to affect a non-"disposable" account.) The only platforms which currently support this kind of read-only access are MT4 and cTrader.

In order to enroll a participant in the competition, we typically need the following information from you:

• Participant's choice of username
• Country (for display purposes)
• Account number
• Account password (preferably a read-only password - see above)

This information can be sent to us in almost any format, at your convenience. For example, you can BCC us on the emails which you send to participants, confirming their registration and containing the account details for them to use in the competition. Alternatively, you can send us end-of-day or end-of-registration lists e.g. from Excel.

In a demo account competition you need to choose between "excitement" and "realism". For example, if you set maximum leverage on the competition accounts to a high figure such as 500:1, then there is a strong likelihood that the competition will be won by someone lucky rather than someone skillful (probably with a return during the competition of around 2000%). Such a competition can typically be won by a trader who simply makes 5 to 10 up/down calls during the competition, betting their entire available margin each time (and blowing up their account if any single call is wrong). If you want a competition which is more guaranteed to reward real trading skill, then we recommend a much tighter cap on maximum leverage.

In addition to the options which you can control on your servers, by setting the parameters for the competition accounts, the FX Blue Labs competition software offers brokers a number of rule-based options to encourage more skilful and realistic results (for example, disqualification from the competition if a drawdown limit such as 30% is breached).