A mere two and half years after it was first released for public testing it is now possible to trade live on MetaTrader 5 using an FSA regulated broker. Today Alpari announced that:
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Last week the NASDAQ listed TradeStation Group announced that:
With the launch of [its] new TradeStation Forex business, TradeStation will have transformed its forex offering from a fully disclosed operation, where it introduces customers to a third-party forex dealer, to one where its new subsidiary, TradeStation Forex, Inc., an approved Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer (RFED) and member of the NFA, acts as principal and directs aggregated pricing to its customers.
The third-party forex dealer referred to in the announcement is currently GAIN Capital, and TradeStation will shortly be cutting out that middleman and dealing directly with a number of liquidity providers. Retail forex traders will be able to use the recently introduced TradeStation 9.0 platform to access that liquidity, and the announcement also stated that:
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Yesterday I spoke at some length with MB Trading's Chris Mercer. Chris is in charge of various aspects of their business, including their MetaTrader 4 project. We started off by discussing MB Trading's recently announced "Get Paid for Limit Orders" initiative, then went on to talk about the intricacies of electronic communication networks. Finally I asked Chris about where the MetaTrader platform fits into all of this, both now and in the future.
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The first day of a new month has arrived, and Ray the Random Robot™ has asked us to update you all on the progress he has been making in the numerous MetaTrader 4 automated trading contests he has been competing in recently.
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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.)
More on Dealing Desk or No Dealing Desk – That is the Question!
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Yesterday I spoke with both Robin Osmond and Martyn Holman, CEO and COO respectively of LMAX, about the launch earlier this week of LMAX Trader and their future plans for both the LMAX multilateral trading facility and the LMAX Trader retail trading platform.
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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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Dukascopy have finally followed in the footsteps of MIG, and after a long wait they have at last received their banking licence from FINMA, the Swiss regulator. Consequently they now proudly call themselves "Dukascopy Bank SA". According to their press release:
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Last week Swiss forex broker Dukascopy announced that they are reducing the minimum lot size for their ECN retail accounts. According to the news section of their website:
Dukascopy (Suisse) SA announces the reduction of minimal lot size. Starting from 8th of January 2010, traders can use mini lots from 0.001 equal to 1000 units of a primary currency amount.
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Alpari UK have just announced that as long as you have at least 20,000 US dollars to spare you are now able to use it to fund a shiny new Alpari Pro account. Demo accounts are available of course, just like in the United States and Russia, but Alpari UK are more than happy to let you open a real account with real money too, as long as you don't reside in the US or in British Columbia that is. Here's how the announcement put it:
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