Fresh from agreeing a settlement with FXCM's UK subsidiary, the CFTC has stepped up its campaign in the courts against "unregistered" RFEDs by announcing that it is bringing civil actions against another 11 foreign currency firms. As in their first such sweep a number of those firms are based in far away places such as Belize, the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus. However two names stand out in the CFTC's blacklist of miscreants as being more "onshore" than the others, namely:
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Yesterday evening customers of UK spreadbet and forex/CFD broker Smart Live Markets received an email announcing that:
Smart Live Financial Services Ltd will be changing its name in the coming weeks to GKFX Financial Services Ltd.
According to the email:
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Citi announced in a press release earlier this week that us poor souls from the UK would have to wait no longer to be able to use the CitiFX Pro platform. According to Citi’s Manager of Margin Foreign Exchange for Europe and the Middle East, Sasha Serebrinsky:
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The first of what may eventually turn into a trio of forex initial public offerings finally came to fruition yesterday evening when FXCM announced that:
Its initial public offering of 15,060,000 shares of its Class A common stock has been priced at $14.00 per share. The shares are expected to begin trading tomorrow, December 2, 2010, on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “FXCM.” The underwriters have been granted a 30-day option to purchase up to 2,259,000 additional shares of Class A common stock at the public offering price less the underwriting discount from FXCM if the underwriters sell more than 15,060,000 shares in the offering.
Time will tell if the underwriters manage to collect those additional shares at a bargain basement price, but FXCM seem to be well on the way to raising over $200 million in new capital. According to Bloomberg:
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Smart Live Markets are proud of their dealing desk and their fixed spreads. In this guest post Paul Hare, their Director of Trading, explains why. (Note that Smart Live Markets are a UK based broker, and are therefore regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Some of the regulatory points Paul makes don't work in quite the same way in other jurisdictions.)
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Last Friday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged the investment bank Goldman Sachs and their London based Vice President Fabrice Tourre with fraud:
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, in particular the role that a major hedge fund played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO.
More on “Morally Bankrupt” Goldman Sachs Investigated by SEC and FSA
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You are probably aware by now that the latest regulatory changes proposed by the CFTC, and in particular the reduction of retail forex leverage to 10 to 1, have caused a lot of consternation in the forex industry, to say the least! I anticipate that one side effect of the new rule will be that even more money will very soon be winging it's way from the United States over the Atlantic to the United Kingdom. If you are, or hope soon to be, a profitable forex trader then you really do need to start considering whether to send your hard earned moolah in this direction too.
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I logged in to my demo FXCM Trading Station this morning to see a very welcome sight, to us here at the Trading Gurus at least. It asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the latest version:
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I received an email this morning from Forex.com promoting the benefits of opening a MetaTrader account with their FSA regulated UK operation. The headline read:
Total control of your trading strategies. – Don't let hedging restrictions affect how you trade your account.
When I clicked on it I didn't receive lots more information about how hedging restrictions might affect my trading. Instead I found myself looking at an online application to open an account at Forex.com UK
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In the second of our series of interviews with senior figures from the Forex industry, I spoke earlier today with Marc Prosser, Chief Marketing Officer of Forex Capital Markets. I started off asking the question on everyone's lips these days about the new "hedging" ban. We then talked about the relative merits of "straight through processing" versus "dealing desk" business models, and then briefly touched on the regulatory aspects of transatlantic transfers of client cash.
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