OTA launches first professional financial training center in UAE

"The U.S. Consulate is pleased to welcome OTA to Knowledge Village and to Dubai and the U.A.E. In our increasingly globalized world, the demand for quality international education programs is skyrocketing. OTA has rightly seized that opportunity, and we look forward to helping it flourish here," said Peter Neisuler, Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Consulate.

Online Trading Academy™ has conducted financial and active trading training since 1997. From its headquarters in Irvine, California, the company has established and progressively developed live classes and online mentoring as its core curriculum in teaching its courses to active self-directed investors and traders. Its teaching methods evolved from the company's roots as one of the largest trading floors in the world with 180 traders who were trading over half a billion dollars of securities daily. The company sold the trading operation in 2001 and became the largest global independent Financial Education Academy. OTA is not a broker-dealer or a software vendor and is a completely independent training school, committed solely to customer education. OTA provides market tested course content, multimedia training CD ROM, webinars and customized education to over 200 financial web sites. Some leading broker/dealer rebate the tuition to OTA students, such as: CyberTrader, A.B. Whatley (symbol: ABWG), RushTrade (symbol: RSHF), TradePortal and Questrade.

To meet public demand for its training programs, Online Trading Academy started to franchise its operations from 2005 that has enabled it to provide additional locations for its Traders Education courses starting with Dallas and Dubai. OTA will be aggressively replicating and expanding its successful business model to 100 cities worldwide over the next four years. This rapid expansion is needed to meet the burgeoning growth of active investors and traders desiring to take control of their assets by learning the financial literacy and the very risk-management oriented skills of Active Investing and Trading in the global markets.

OTA's Dubai owner and Managing Director Bahram Khadavi states: "Opening in the U.A.E. was an easy choice given the growing population of self-directed investors and traders alike who want to learn the skills necessary to succeed in today's market climate without broker dependency. Our principle interest is to continue to make the markets fully transparent and pass on time-tested trading skills to those who desire to gain greater intelligence with which to guide their financial decisions in placing their trades. Online Trading Academy will continue to maintain a focus on making financial education and market literacy available to the public, and this expansion will give more people increased access to our training as well as permitting geographical preference to all. Trading has fast become a universal concept. In all countries, we seem to be moving closer and closer to Online Trading and 'global' markets from home-based broadband computers through the internet. I believe that our newly established OTA location in the U.A.E. evidences our commitment to that kind of forward-thinking."

Under the tutelage of a team of professional traders as instructors, a highly motivated group of student/traders engages the market with live real-time trading accounts using OTA's capital. We will provide the local financial community this remarkable approach to Trader Education that has become the company's signature. All locations will begin to sponsor events such as free weekly "Power Trading Workshops" as well as monthly, daily and weekend classes in stock, currencies, options index and futures trading.

According to Bear Stearns & Company, Inc., (Symbol: BSC) in their August 2004 Report, there is a core group of active individual "Semi-Pro" traders. The report indicates that "these customers trade more than 25 times per day and account for 78% of daily online trades and 32% of daily combined NYSE and NASDAQ share volume." While there are no statistics available as yet for other markets such as currencies, options and futures, Bear Stearns comments that "there is a heightened interest from semi-pro traders in auto execution functionality, advanced analytics, connectivity to non-U.S. markets, risk-management tools, and listed trading". OTA believes that is just the tip of the iceberg and is more than committed to offer the best education possible to the institutions and general public to enhance their trading knowledge in order to avoid learning by the common trial and error mistakes in the markets.

Online Trading Academy™ Dubai is pleased to bring the best education possible directly from the US to the very promising GCC markets. In addition to its regular training, starting September 2005, OTA will address local needs with specially designed courses and training individuals actively investing and trading in the UAE Stock markets as well as by offering seminar series and consultancy services for expatriates wishing to gain knowledge of the UAE Stock Markets.

"We are very happy to welcome Online Trading Academy, the world's largest independent financial education academy, to the booming UAE market. We are very pleased that our Dubai office was able to assist OTA establish its training center at Knowledge Village, and we are confident that OTA will do well here. Christian Reed, Commercial Counselor, US Embassy Abu Dhabi"