First of all, here's a screenshot from FXCM's flavour of MetaTrader 4 on January 15th 2015 :
The cause of the big gap was the following announcement from the Swiss National Bank at 9:30 GMT this morning:
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Regular readers will recall that we reported back in 2011 that IBFX had been acquired by TradeStation, itself part of the Japanese Monex Group. Now it looks as though Monex has finished its brief excursion into MetaTrader land. I've received several emails announcing the news summarised in today's headline. According to FXCM's news release:
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In a news release yesterday FXCM announced that:
Its U.S. subsidiary Forex Capital Markets LLC has agreed to assume the forex accounts of Alpari US LLC.
On Friday, September 27, 2013, accepted Alpari U.S. accounts will be transferred to FXCM U.S. after the close of trading.
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Fresh from having their UK subsidiary fined by the CFTC earlier this month, FXCM have now been fined $2 million by the National Futures Association. Once again the complaint against FXCM and their CEO Drew Niv and details of the agreed settlement have been published simultaneously. Once again FXCM neither admit nor deny the allegations in the complaint, which concern FXCM's failure to pass on positive slippage from their liquidity providers to their customers, and lapses in their anti money laundering procedures. However this time around FXCM's customers do stand to benefit financially since one of the agreed sanctions states that:
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Following their recent IPOs US brokers GAIN Capital and FXCM now seem to be engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of retail forex traders instead of investors in their respective businesses. In a press release today FXCM announced a new section on their website which they call the FXCM Forex Execution Center. I can't help but wonder if that announcement is in any way related to the new Pricing and Execution section on GAIN's Forex.com website and their Trade Execution Scorecard, which was announced in a press release yesterday.
More on Dealing Desk or No Dealing Desk – Forex.com or FXCM?
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GKFX are proud of their dealing desk and their fixed spreads. In this guest post Paul Hare, their Director of Trading, explains why. (Note that GKFX are a UK based broker, and are therefore regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA for short, and formerly 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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Following the recent release of their forex trader profitability statistics, Jason Rogers of FXCM has written a guest post for us on the topic of the moment – "Why have traders been unprofitable"
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Thanks to yesterday's disappointing Non-farm Payroll numbers the greenback fell and my troublesome sell limit order at European broker ActivTrades finally got filled. Consequently my new Interbank MetaTrader 4 micro-lot account with them is now fully funded, and open for business. As you can imagine, I have had one or two long discussions with ActivTrades over the last couple of days. During the course of those they pointed out to me that enough of their liquidity providers are now willing to quote and fill a 1K trade that it had now proved possible for them to introduce micro-lots on their "Straight Through Processing" (STP for short) MetaTrader Interbank accounts. When I enquired what "enough" meant in this context, the number three was mentioned. Unlike their Standard account, there is no "averaging algorithm" inserted by ActivTrades between you and the banks on their Interbank account. Instead they just add a bit to the spreads they are quoted, since they have to earn a crust somehow just like the rest of us.
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