The global financial crisis took yet another turn for the worse on Monday. According to Yahoo! Finance:
MF Global's meltdown in less than a week made it the biggest U.S. casualty of Europe's debt crisis, and the seventh-largest bankruptcy by assets in U.S. history.
The chief executive of MF Global Holdings Ltd. is Jon Corzine. According to The Economist recently, Mr. Corzine is:
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It's been quite a long wait, but Alpari UK have announced today that they are now the second broker to offer automated spread betting using the MetaTrader 4 platform to UK residents. According to their news release:
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We were just gearing ourselves up to gently launch Ray Robot II™ onto an unsuspecting world when Alpari UK announced that they had started offering MetaTrader 4 spread betting accounts. In contrast to some reports elsewhere on the web, here at the Trading Gurus we are well aware that automated spread betting via MT4 has been available for well over a year from another broker – the recently renamed GKFX. We figured we'd kill several birds with one stone by running RR2 in identical fashion on live accounts from both MT4 spread bet brokers. While we're at it we thought we'd also try him out on demo accounts from both brokers, to see if there is any noticeable difference between automated live trading and pretend trading at our small sample of MetaTrader brokers. Whilst we're at that we thought we'd also compare some backtest results with all those forward test results, to see whether that made any difference to the outcome(s).
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Ray Robot II™ has been automatically spreadbetting on four different accounts for 3 days now, two of which are live accounts with real money in them, and two of which are solely for demonstration purposes. The trades themselves have been fairly uneventful so far, although I'm sure much more excitement is waiting just around the corner! Today the live and demo accounts at both GKFX and Alpari UK all suffered their third 10 pip loss in a row. They all shorted GBP/USD just below the previous day's low yet again, and they all lost once more. Some sort of a pattern does seem to be developing however. Just like yesterday, it took longer for Ray's stop loss to get taken out at GKFX than it did at Alpari UK. 6 minutes at GKFX versus 5 mins at Alpari UK on this morning's trade.
More on Our MetaTrader 4 Spread Betting Live Test Suffers Some Delays
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I've just received an email which says it's from "Todd Crosland, President, IBFX Australia Pty. Ltd.". The email starts off by saying that:
As you may have already seen in the recently issued press release, IBFX Holdings, LLC has been acquired by TradeStation Group, Inc., a recognized leader in online trading and winner of Barron's 2011 "Best Online Broker" award. TradeStation is part of Monex Group, a leading Japanese online brokerage firm.
According to the TradeStation press release that Todd mentioned in his email:
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Another day dawns, and all four of Ray Robot's MetaTrader spread betting accounts have suffered another small loss overnight. Another cable short, another -10.0 pips, Ray's bottom line down to £246.00 at both GKFX and Alpari UK. This "false breakout" was however longer lasting than the previous ones. It took 3 hours and 21 minutes on both GKFX and Alpari for Ray's (overly tight?) stops to get taken out this morning.
More on Persistent Patterns in Ray's Spread Betting Live Test
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We reported at the beginning of November on the abrupt downfall of Jon Corzine. If you recall Mr. Corzine is an ex "Democratic" governor and senator, and now ex CEO of MF Global Inc. as well as an ex CEO of Goldman Sachs. He has just presided over the seventh largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, one of the regulators supposedly keeping an eye on dodgy dealings on Wall Street on behalf of U.S. taxpayers, has released a long statement about the affair. Amongst other things CFTC Commisioner Scott D. O’Malia has this to say:
More on The CFTC Finally Realize That MF Global "Has Shaken Public Confidence"!
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Just over a year ago we reported that "Microsoft Enters Retail Forex". It now seems as though what with one thing and another that little (ad)venture didn't turn out as originally hoped. At that time I opened an MSN Trader account of my very own, but yesterday I received an email from saxobank.com informing me that:
More on Microsoft Exits Retail Forex – MSN Trader Reverts to Saxo Bank
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Last weekend LMAX quietly announced to those of their customers carrying trades over the weekend that they were introducing what MetaTrader brokers refer to as micro-lots on their spot forex contracts. Whichever way you look at it, that title is something of a misnomer, but we'll explain what it means to a client of LMAX.
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