According to the Financial Services Authority website they have:
Today fined Barclays Bank Plc (Barclays) £59.5 million for misconduct relating to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR). This is the largest fine ever imposed by the FSA.
Not only that, but also according to a United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission press release (and using that ever more familar form of words that implies nobody is actually responsible) they have:
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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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WorldSpreads are (or perhaps I should say were?) an AIM listed spread betting broker, famous in this part of the world for offering "zero spreads" on some popular instruments as long as you sent them £5000 up front. This morning their website has taken on a whole new look. After an obviously hasty redesign over the weekend it now says:
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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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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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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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