In the second in our series of interviews with senior figures from the Forex industry following the release of the final version of the new CFTC regulations, I spoke yesterday with Jason Rogers, FXCM's Brand Ambassador to online communities. I started off asking my standard $64,000 question at the moment about the effect of those new regulations on the forex industry. I asked numerous other questions too, many of which Jason was compelled to answer with "no comment" because of restrictions imposed by FXCM's forthcoming Initial Public Offering. Despite that you will be able to read about FXCM's views on a few other topics of the moment below.
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FXCM have made a couple of announcements recently about new developments they've introduced to make it easier for their customers to start automated trading. First they announced their new Strategy Trader platform with quite a bit of razmatazz, then with rather less fanfare earlier this month they invited their clients to get involved in open beta testing of their new products via FXCM Labs. It's said that these things come in threes, and FXCM have just quietly revealed via the FXCM Labs forum that starting on Monday users of the venerable Trading Station platform will be able to program their own automated trading strategies too.
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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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Following hot on the heels of the announcement of the Strategy Tester public beta testing program, FXCM are now inviting their clients to sign up for FXCM Labs:
An online research center that grants clients exclusive access to FXCM products and services still in the development stages.
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For the last month FXCM have been busy migrating all the new customers they acquired when they took over UK broker ODL. I have now received several emails from ODL on the topic. The one I received on May 21st informed me that:
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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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I logged in to my demo FXCM Trading Station this morning to see a very welcome sight, to us here at the Trading Gurus at least. It asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the latest version:
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A couple of months ago FXCM told us that they were working on educational materials to explain the changes involved in complying with the new NFA "hedging" and FIFO regulations to their customers. Here is one of FXCM's new educational videos explaining to their customers how to manage risk in this brave new world of forex orders without built in stops. To summarise, FXCM are introducing a new type of order called "One Cancels the Other" or OCO for short, which will already be familiar to many futures traders.
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In the second of our series of interviews with senior figures from the Forex industry, I spoke earlier today with Marc Prosser, Chief Marketing Officer of Forex Capital Markets. I started off asking the question on everyone's lips these days about the new "hedging" ban. We then talked about the relative merits of "straight through processing" versus "dealing desk" business models, and then briefly touched on the regulatory aspects of transatlantic transfers of client cash.
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