Oil Traders Panic…not because of prices, but because Yahoo Messenger is going away
Yahoo announced last month that they’re ending support of their legacy versions of their IM product, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and after August 5 will only support their web-based version. Unfortunately, for global oil traders who have for almost 2 decades used Yahoo IM as one their two default communication/trading channels (the other being the phone), the new version of Yahoo IM doesn’t support the capture/recording of conversations and allows users to “unsend” messages…meaning the new version of Yahoo IM will not be compliant with trading regulations in most jurisdictions.
Though a number of alternative platforms exist, recent news stories indicate the loss of Yahoo IM has sent some oil traders into an emotional crisis, with one being quoted on Reuters as saying, “You have no idea how much I’ll miss Yahoo Messenger…I built up hundreds of contacts on it over more than a decade. I have Yahoo friends I have never met, but with whom I spent many hours bantering and joking. It also made me a lot of money. Now that it’s gone, I could cry.”
Natural gas traders have faced a similar problem in the last couple of years. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) had been pretty much the default choice for those traders since the late 1990’s…at least in the US. But with rumors of AOL discontinuing support for AIM and faced with increased regulatory pressures brought by Dodd-Frank, most were forced to jump ship to other platforms, and most seemed to choose ICE Instant Messenger. ICE IM allows users to consolidate messages from multiple platforms, including Yahoo and AIM, and being purpose built for trading (based on technology acquired from YellowJacket in 2008), ensures compliance with data retention regulations. The hurdle for many though will be that ICE IM, while free for exchanging simple messages, will charge you for use of their data interface and other high level capabilities such as automatic recognition and commitment of trades.
So, will oil traders flock to ICE IM like the gas traders have done? Though rumors indicate that many have already done so as activity on ICE IM has picked up considerably over the last month, there are a number of alternative platforms for those oil traders to move to, including Thompson Reuters Eikon messaging system, which like ICE IM can aggregate messages from Yahoo and AIM. Thompson Reuters announced on Friday that their user counts have increased as well over the last month (now at 288k users) and that market heavyweights Gazprom and Dong have just “endorsed” the platform…countering an announcement from ICE in late June that Glencore chose ICE IM as their preferred messaging system. Still others, like Symphony (from the financial and banking space and backed by Goldman Sachs) and Bloomberg Messenger are also pitching their wares to the now IM-less oil traders as well.
So, which IM providers will win the war for the heavy hearts of these oil traders? Maybe none of the competing vendors will be the clear winner…after all, every oil trader still has a phone that they can use to call their Yahoo “friends” that chose a different IM path.
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