Traders return after the summer, but levels still lower than last year. LeapRate's Retail FX Volume Index, sponsored by Leverate, rose by 7% in September to $179 billion per day. While a healthy monthly increase, retail FX trading levels were coming off a low base due to consecutive 10.5% and 5% decreases in the index…
Read moreFirm volumes overall recover nicely following August "glitch". Brokerage firm Knight Capital -- which famously nearly went under in early August after a trading glitch in its equities business caused a $400 million loss -- announced its volumes for September, and in most key categories things seem to have stabilized. In its Forex ECN unit…
Read moreRetail picks up in Sept for FXCM, but not Institutional. Leading retail FX firm FXCM, the world's largest online FX broker, announced its September volumes, with retail volumes coming in at $304 billion for the month, and institutional at $46 billion. Comparatively (see chart below), retail volumes were up 12% as compared with August, but institutional volumes…
Read moreBinary Options market heating up, as brokers look to add new products. Binary options, digital options and financial spreadbetting have been around for a long time. However most Forex brokerage firms have avoided offering such trading to their clients, as win-it-all-or-lose-it-all trading has been (correctly) viewed as closer to gambling than it is to trading…
Read moreWells Fargo selects Integral to launch its new FX platform. Two weeks ago came word that Barclays had replaced Integral with a white label from FXCM for its FX solution. Well today comes word that Integral has indeed won another large bank client, this time Wells Fargo. Integral announced that it was selected by Wells Fargo…
Read moreSaxo Bank continues worldwide expansion, this time in Latin America. Saxo Bank, a member of LeapRate's Approved List of global Forex firms, today announced that it is acquiring its Uruguay-based white label partner NVN Securities. NVN is licensed by the Uruguayan Central Bank, and has been a White Label client of Saxo Bank since 2006.…
Read moreGives FXCM flexibility to raise public equity or debt. Leading retail FX firm FXCM, the world's largest online FX broker (and a member of LeapRate's Approved List), filed a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (or "SEC") which will allow FXCM to issue up to $125 million in equity and/or debt securities in the…
Read moreFX volumes rising nicely, but have a long way to go. As we have seen with other FX product aggregators such as Thomson Reuters and the CME Group, volumes at Forex ECN ICAP-EBS saw a nice double-digit-percentage rise in September, but remain well below "normal" levels seen throughout last year. EBS's volumes rose by 17%…
Read more... but still remain well below last year's levels. Thomson Reuters announced their September FX ECN volumes at $133 billion per day -- 16% above August's anemic $115 billion, but still 24% below last year September's $176 billion, and the $150B+ monthly figures seen throughout most of 2011. We are seeing a very clear pattern…
Read moreFirst peek at what looks like a good month for FX volumes. 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 42% in September from August to an average of 1.035 million contracts daily. That growth though is somewhat misleading,…
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