...I want to host on my own network and hardware so that it's private, records are private and I can control everything.
Everyone of the private chat networks for traders that I know and hosted by a trader or business...its FREE to the trader (chat members) because the trader is using the service of the business (e.g. Bloomberg Professional host its own private chat network for its subscribers) or is employed by the business or is an individual professional trader communicating privately with other professional traders (usually a handful of folks) that don't want any public eyes or regulation agencies
snooping around the discussions in the private chat.
Unfortunately, there's been an increasing number of private trader chat room
abuse lately that global regulators have been spending more time investigating the past few years that has resulted in heavy financial fines, job firings and even criminal convictions (jail time).
My guess is that they were thinking its easier to hide or destroy conversations when its not hosted on someone's else server that's not their own servers/network.
In fact, many well known financial institutions (e.g. JP Morgan Chase, UBS) were
banning their own private trader chat network because traders were using multidealer chat rooms to manipulate prices in many global markets including insider trading.
I've been reading online articles about penalties (fines) as high as 1.5 billion dollars on institutional firms (e.g. UBS) levied on them by regulators just on the issue of how institutional traders, floor traders, hedge funds were NOT doing enough to prevent the abuse by its traders that were manipulating prices after planning such with each other in these private chat rooms.
Further, I was talking to a close friend that is an institutional trader in Montreal and he expressed concerned that regulators may be "snooping" in on his private chat conversations with other professional traders globally. Yeah, I already know he's under tremendous amounts of pressure to "perform" and he admitted that these private chat rooms setup exclusively for institutional traders are just seeds for "abuse".
I'm not suggesting that's what you're interested in doing. Instead, I'm suggesting that if you want to "manage" you're own private chat server and network for traders...you're going to need to play
big brother and monitor what's being discussed by users of your private network because you'll be liable for any abuse by those using your "private network". Being the big brother is not an easy task and you may want to think very carefully about going down that route.
[Today's digital technology has allowed more and more professional traders to communicate with each other globally. Conversations that has proven to have an impact on global markets accordingly to the investigations by regulatory agencies. This puts a spin on what traders are doing to get that next big Christmas bonus and big promotion]
