Has EBS now lost its lead in the Forex ECN business to rivals Thomson Reuters and FXall? ICAP's Forex ECN unit EBS reported March FX trading volumes at $120.4 billion (average daily volume for the month), down 19% from February and down 2% from last year March. After two strong months to start the year, things slowed down at EBS in March.…
Read moreJapan's retail Forex brokers are having a hard time duplicating January and February's great start to the year. Monex Group, a mid-size Japanese retail FX broker, announced that March volumes came in at ¥126,613 million per day (about $30 billion in monthly volume), down about 28% from February's $41 billion in monthly volume. Still, one of…
Read moreMarch FX volumes at CME come in at 1.072M contracts per day, up 0.5% from 1.067M in February. CME Group, which runs the world's largest derivatives marketplace, surpassed a near-record February with a (slightly) even better March. FX contract volumes (mainly Eurodollar futures contracts) traded at CME hit 1,072,000 per day in March, up 0.5%…
Read moreCentral Bank of Cyprus has agreed to not haircut segregated bank accounts over €100,000, where the ultimate beneficiaries are small individual investors. LeapRate Exclusive... LeapRate has learned that Cyprus' financial regulator CySEC is working on behalf of licensed Cyprus investment firms, which include many FX and Binary brokers, to prevent the dreaded "haircut" on bank accounts…
Read moreGMO Click did $694 billion of spot FX volume in March, down 17% from record February volumes. FX volumes continued to be strong during March in Japan, as the global risk-on trade combined with local "Abe-nomics" to keep retail traders interested in the currency markets. However volumes were down somewhat from February. Japan's largest retail…
Read moreThe UK breaks the FSA into two parts – the FCA, and the PRA. The UK's Financial Services Act 2012 goes into effect today, (technically yesterday, April 1 2013, but it was the Easter Monday bank holiday in the UK), whereby the UK's financial regulator the FSA is being broken into two parts -- the FCA,…
Read moreSpotware Connect will help third-party app developers to easily build their own cTrader systems. The FX platform market is becoming increasingly about openness, and allowing third party developers to come out with best-of-breed add-ons, apps and applications for traders and brokers alike. Spotware Systems, which develops the leading FX ECN platforms cTrader and cAlgo (clients include…
Read moreSocial and copytrading platform provider Ayondo replaces top management. LeapRate Exclusive.... LeapRate has learned that Manuel Heyden has resigned from the the company he co-founded and headed as CEO, Ayondo. Based in Germany, Ayondo provides social and copytrading trading platforms to FX brokers such as AvaFX (a member of LeapRate's Approved List). Heyden will be replaced…
Read moreAustralia's smaller FX brokers are scrambling to offload market-making, to avoid higher capital charges. Australia continues to be one of the hottest FX markets out there. The country's Forex and CFD sectors continue to grow and -- more importantly -- Australia is an important base for attracting clients in fast growing Asian markets, specifically China.…
Read moreClaimed its software had shown positive returns on every trade it ever made. Did people actually believe that??? The CFTC has fined California-based Victor Yu his company VFRS a total of $3.2 million in a foreign currency fraud action. The order finds that Yu and VFRS misrepresented that they had developed trading software that made forex…
Read more