I attended the 2015 FIX Trading Community EMEA Trading Conference yesterday at Old Billingsgate in London yesterday. You'll hear more from me about all that in due course, because I'm under strict instructions to "quote check" with assorted speakers before pressing the "Publish" button! However I am able to reveal that I bumped into Kevin Houstoun, Chairman of Rapid Addition, at the post conference "cocktail party". Kevin pointed me at his work on the UK Government's Foresight Review on the Future of Computer Trading in Financial Markets. Here's an overview of that project:
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Betfair Group PLC made an announcement today via the London Stock Exchange's Regulatory News Service revealing their preliminary results for the year to April 30th 2012. They headlined with the opinion that:
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Following on from last month's European attack on the City of London a new front has opened up in the war currently being waged to regulate away risk in the world's financial markets. However this time around Britain is fighting back in the courts! Bloomberg reports that:
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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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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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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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Last night The Daily Telegraph reported that British forex broker ODL Group Ltd. has "agreed on terms to be acquired" by FXCM Holdings LLC. It looks as though the new brand of the combined organization in Europe is going to be "ODL Powered by FXCM – Bigger, Better, Stronger"
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London Capital Group Holdings plc are behind a considerable number of UK spread betting brokers, including Capital Spreads, ProSpreads, Dealing Desk and even Saxo Bank Financial Spreads. At the beginning of this week they issued their third profit warning. According to the Financial Times:
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