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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Earlier this week Robert Lande, chief financial officer of US broker FXCM Inc, was interviewed on Bloomberg about the prospects for FXCM following their recent IPO. Robert also talked about the prospects for retail forex in general. Here's that interview:
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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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MSN Trader is now live! According to the web site it's "The Investor Platform of the Future". Despite the slightly confusing initial publicity, from 12:00 GMT today there have been over 160 currency pairs available for trading on MSN Trader, as long as you are a UK resident.
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According to Computer Weekly Microsoft will be launching MSN Trader for the benefit of retail traders here in the UK on Wednesday, pasting a white label version of Saxo Bank's WebTrader platform into MSN Money:
More on Microsoft Enters Retail Forex. Launches MSN Trader with Saxo Bank
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The Betfair Group IPO was initially mooted back in 2005, but was then put back on the shelf. On September 21st Betfair announced that they intended to list their shares on the London Stock Exchange and last week the prospectus was published at long last, informing any interested readers that:
More on Betfair IPO a Success. Will FXCM Succeed Where GAIN Did Not?
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First there was Betfair. Then came Tradefair. Today there is LMAX Trader, which has just been launched amid a flurry of publicity, it's mission "to transform retail contracts for difference (CFD) and FX trading". In the press release LMAX chief executive Robin Osmond is quoted as saying:
More on LMAX Trader Launched to "Transform Retail FX Trading"
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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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I've had a live account with London based broker ActivTrades for quite a while now. It's one of their "Standard" MetaTrader 4 accounts. I opened it because it offers micro-lots and lots of exotic currency crosses, along with a wide range of non-forex instruments, including stock indices, gold, oil and other commodities too. That combination is a little hard to come by at other brokers. It is slightly old fashioned however, in that it still uses 4 decimal places and fixed spreads. 2 on the FTSE 100 and 3 on GBP/USD for example, most of the time at least.
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A recent addition to the ranks of UK forex brokers has finally delivered something we've been waiting to see for a long time now here at the Trading Gurus. If you are a UK resident it is now possible to spread bet using MetaTrader 4 as your trading platform. You can now therefore use an MT4 expert advisor to automate your tax free forex trading, if you are so inclined.
More on Smart Live Markets Marry MetaTrader and Spread Betting
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