Cryptocurrencies, virtual money, or digital coinage, a rose by any other name, still smells as sweet. The latest amusing sideshows of government officials not knowing how to corral the new digital age come to you from Japan and Russia. The Financial Services Agency (FSA) in Japan, the local regulator, is considering the classification of all…
Read more
Investors do not like Bear Markets, unless they are professional traders that love nothing better than to short an overbought sector of the market. For institutional investors, however, traders are always on the lookout for the sector that has the most “up” potential, while discarding anything that feels the pull of gravity downwards. During what…
Read more
Cryptocurrencies have been labeled the most volatile asset class in history, and for that reason, many of the monitoring services employed by traditional stock exchanges to ferret out price manipulation or pump-and-dump schemes just do not work in the crypto world. Jay Clayton, the chairman of the SEC, has continually castigated exchanges in the crypto…
Read more
As 2018 draws to a close, economists, bankers, and major hedge fund managers dust off their respective crystal balls and begin to contemplate the future. These exercises will go into high gear over the prevailing weeks, as new predictions for major index funds, commodities, and currencies twelve months down the road will proliferate the Internet.…
Read more
Major payment system providers like Visa (NYSE:V) and MasterCard (NYSE:MA) may be having nightmares lately and for good reason. The word on the street is that Facebook is aggressively moving forward with plans to create an internal payment system that connects overnight its 2.3 billion active customer base. How do you do this feat without…
Read more
The financial services industry has never been as exciting as other technology-driven genres. Things, however, changed a few years back, when blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies seized the imagination of the public, and more importantly, the imagination of entrepreneurs, investors, and the venture funding establishment. The new buzzword around town became “FinTech”, a bit sexier than…
Read more
The SEC is determined to eradicate the rampant fraud that persists within the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) space. Steven Peikin, co-director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, recently delivered a speech to the Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems in which he made known his agency’s desire to clean up the…
Read more
When we think of regulators, we normally envision government officials auditing financial service firms, incarcerating fraudsters, and generally being a pain in the neck for all those within their purview, but one key part of their mission statement is also to educate the investing public and keep them aware of important trends. In that latter…
Read more
The following article was written by ATFX Chief Analyst of Asia Pacific, Martin Lam. Personal opinions today: The European Central Bank decided to end its LTRO at the end of the year, but did not indicate a short-term rate hike schedule. In the absence of interest rate hikes and time, the euro fell against the dollar.…
Read more
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have gotten a bad reputation due to rampant fraud and the lack of transparency. Regulators, in their attempt to protect unsuspecting investors, have launched attacks to classify all cryptocurrencies, with the exception of Bitcoin and Ether, as securities and thereby subject to more stringent registration and disclosure requirments. The SEC has…
Read more