March 05, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

CME Group February FX volumes – one of its best months ever!

Looks like February was another blowout month in the electronic FX trading world. CME Group, which runs the world's largest derivatives marketplace, announced that FX contract volumes (mainly Eurodollar futures contracts) in its system were up by 19% in February from January, and up 26% from last year February, to an average of 1,067,000 contracts…

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March 04, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

GMO Click February volumes beat January records

GMO Click did $845 billion of spot FX volume in February, an all-time record for a retail FX brokerage firm. It has been just a few weeks since we reported that GMO Click Securities reported record volumes for any month in its history, with ¥68 trillion (or $756 billion) transacted by its clients during January. Well,…

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March 04, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

European regulator ESMA warns on CFD trading

Is this ESMA's way of indicating it plans to tighten rules for CFD trading? The EU's financial markets regulator, ESMA (the European Securities and Markets Authority), has issued a somewhat strange and "plain-vanilla" sounding warning against CFD trading by retail investors.  The ESMA warning on CFD trading states that ESMA is concerned that "during the current…

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March 01, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

Dukascopy enters Turkey, signs white label deal with Turkey's largest broker

Dukascopy signs up Turkey's largest broker, Integral Menkul Değerler, as a White Label client. Turkey continues to be one of the hottest FX markets out there. Today comes word that Switzerland's Dukascopy has signed Turkey's İntegral Menkul Değerler, the largest broker in Turkey, as a white label client. İntegral Menkul will be launching an online FX business in…

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March 01, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

MarketSpreads to rebrand as Shelbourne Markets

MarketSpreads to expand its offerings for traders, investors, and corporates. LeapRate has learned that Ireland-based financial spreadbetting broker MarketSpreads will be rebranding, effective already next week, under its new name Shelbourne Markets. The strategy behind the name change seems quite obvious -- the company will be expanding from spreadbetting to other areas of financial trading,…

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March 01, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

PFSOFT releases mobile trading applications

Another broker launches using PFSOFT software, SkyonFX. A lot of the software development we're seeing lately in the FX trading world has been centered on two, somewhat connected themes -- apps and mobile. Today comes word that trading platform provider PFSOFT has launched its mobile suite -- free mobile applications for iOS and Android devices, available…

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February 27, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

Saxo Bank opens Uruguay office

Follows the acquisition last year by Saxo Bank of its Latin American white label partner. Those who follow our blog will know that, as we reported last October, Saxo Bank acquired its Montevideo, Uruguay-based white label partner NVN Securities. So it should come as no surprise that Saxo Bank has now formally opened its office in Montevideo,…

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February 27, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

DCM Capital 'auction' is a flop, top 'bid' £120,000

DCM did generate a lot of free press for itself. But was it worth it? Would you give money to these guys??? As we're proving here just by writing this, the innovative team at new FX and spreadbetting firm DCM Capital in the UK did succeed in getting for itself a healthy amount of free…

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February 26, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

xFSOL introduces the X3 Open Trading Hub for FX brokers

Allows FX brokers to differentiate, and find new revenue streams via social and apps. FX software and platform provider X Financial Solutions (xFSOL) has announced the launch of its X3 Open Trading Hub -- a trading environment which comes pre-bundled with xSocial, xStore and mobile and tablet trading applications. Using X3, brokers can create their own…

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February 26, 2013 BY Gerald Segal

MT5 gets long-awaited one-click trading

MetaQuotes continues to quietly lead traders to MT5 from MT4. As first reported by FX software expert firm CMAP, MetaQuotes Software -- maker of the popular MT4 and MT5 MetaTrader trading platform -- has introduced one-click trading functionality to charts in build 770 of the MetaTrader 5 client terminal. According to CMAP, this long-awaited functionality has…

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