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?
Filed under Brokers by 
The CFTC releases details of actions it has taken against a variety of miscreants in the retail forex industry on a fairly regular basis. They have just released another one, which caught my eye because the sums of money involved are somewhat larger than usual, and also somewhat unusually:
Filed under Regulation by
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.
Filed under Brokers by
At long last August 2nd has been and gone, and the dust has settled slightly. We'll cover what still works and what doesn't in a forthcoming post, but for today we're going to concentrate on who said what, and when. We'll do that by working our way down the list of retail forex brokers included in the CFTC report on the financial strength of Futures Commission Merchants. For some reason it seems the better capitalised a broker is the less it has to say about the FIFO fiasco!
Filed under Brokers by
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently released its latest report on financial data for Futures Commission Merchants. This contains the numbers as of May 31st 2009, "from reports filed by June 30th 2009". This report is particularly interesting because on May 16th the NFA's minimum net capital requirement for Forex Dealer Members increased from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000. The CFTC helpfully allow you to download monthly data going back to 2002 too. It's interesting to discover which brokers have fallen by the wayside over recent months as successive increases in regulatory capital requirements have weeded out the weaker players.
Filed under Regulation by
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
Filed under Brokers by
It's now three month's since "Forex MegaDroid landed on the Forex industry like a BOMB". The time has come to try and tie together all the backtesting, forward testing and live testing, and to decide whether to keep the Droid running on our virtual private server for a while longer. Unfortunately this is not an easy task!
Filed under Trading Systems by
As you know, I was idly perusing the Boston Technologies website the other day when I happened across their very own MetaTrader robot, which seems to have developed an unfortunate habit of losing money rather than making it hand over fist.
Filed under Brokers by
I've just put the phone down after a long conversation with George Tchetvertakov, head of market research at Alpari UK. We started off talking about the new NFA "hedging" regulations and their effects on the retail foreign exchange business. Eventually we moved on to discuss some other topics, including using hedging as a means of reducing risk, and George's opinions about markets in general.
Filed under Regulation by
Gain Capital are another foreign exchange broker who are now promoting their MetaTrader platform through an FSA regulated UK company. Gain have long used the FOREX.com brand in the United States. According to the press releases section of their website:
Filed under Regulation by
