Looking back at the most intriguing and popular industry news from the past week between 18th and 22th May on LeapRate.
FXCM Group, LLC, the international provider of online foreign exchange trading, CFD trading, cryptocurrencies and related services, announced a wider launch of its Stock Basket offering to customers. The company added foreign exchange and crypto baskets to its retail offering last year.
Cboe Global Markets, Inc. entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MATCHNow from Virtu Financial, Inc. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2020. In addition to geographical expansion, ownership of MATCHNow will provide Cboe with a strategic pathway to build towards a comprehensive equities platform for the Canadian markets.
The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), the global industry group for exchanges and CCPs welcomes the decision to remove the short selling bans across Europe and endorses the authorities’ efforts to return to normal operations of fair and orderly markets in the region. Financial regulators worldwide put in place emergency procedures to suspend short-selling of certain financial instruments amid Covid-19 induced market volatility. This week, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) noted and endorsed the decision of member authorities of Austria, Belgium, France, Greece and Spain to withdraw their restrictions.
Online gaming and financial trading giant Playtech PLC (LON:PTEC) released its trading volumes for the first quarter of 2020, between 1 January and 30 April. The company has benefited from the Covid-19 induced market volatility and has reported strong performance for its financial division TradeTech Group (which includes CFH, Alpha, Markets.com) Trade tech reported Adjusted EBITDA of over €45 million for Q1 2020, exceeding the company’s expectations for the business.
Technology provider AMTS Solutions considerably expanded its range of product offerings with the launch of MetaTrader 5 gateways to dozens of liquidity providers, including prominent providers like LMAX, CFH, IG, Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley.
eWarrant Japan Securities K.K. launched MetaTrader 5 for Nikkei and Dow Jones indices trading. The company implemented its services eWarrant Direct in September 2019, allowing its clients to trade covered warrants via a dedicated platform. In April 2020, the company added MetaTrader 5 to its portfolio allowing investors to improve their trading strategies to better suit the market conditions.
Small cryptocurrency Tezos has been gaining traction recently and people are saying it may surpass Bitcoin. Tezos has risen about 91% since the beginning of the year. It was trading at $2.60 currently with market capitalization of close to $1.817 billion. In January, Tezos was the 15th most vulnerable crypto asset by market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap data. Since then it has managed to rise to the top ten most valuable cryptocurrencies and could surpass some of its competitors with its current momentum.
Brokeree Solutions, a technology provider of forex brokers solutions, announced its new product – Dynamic Margin and Leverage plugin for MetaTrader 4 and 5. The new product allows brokers to control the risk exposure of their clients and set up different leverage per client or symbol. An essential component of the plugin is “scheduled rules”. It allows brokers to preconfigure margin rate changes for the news events that are likely to increase market volatility and price spikes and thus limit clients’ risk exposure and minimize potential losses.
Virtu Financial, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIRT), a financial services and technology provider, announced the launch of Open Technology, a new data-as-a-service platform. Open Technology offers a vast range of services and data endpoints enabled by unified application programming interface (API) architecture. The APIs provides access for subscribers of normalized market-data calculations and enriched transaction cost data across equity, FX, fixed income and futures.
LiquidityMatch LLC’s wholly owned subsidiary FXSpotStream LLC announced that Societe Generale has joined FXSpotStream’s price streaming Service as a liquidity provider. Societe Generale is the 15th bank that provides liquidity for the FXSpotStream’s Service’s clients and second to join this year. The existing liquidity providers on the service include Barclays, BofA, BNP Paribas, Citi, Commerzbank AG, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, Standard Chartered, State Street and UBS.
Shares in the US fell on Wednesday after a virtual congressional hearing, where Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell set out differing views of the US’ economic outlook. Republican Mnuchin argued that there is a risk of permanent economic damage if there are delays in bringing states out of lockdown and said that the Treasury is anticipating taking losses on its $500bn lending programs to support businesses. Powell’s perspective took a different tone. The central banker argued that fear of the coronavirus is the biggest barrier to economic recovery, and so ensuring Americans feel safe about resuming normal economic activity should be the priority.
The dollar is gaining ground to other major currencies during early Thursday trading, once again assuming its safe haven role as the positivity of the last few days fizzles away. For most of the week market sentiment had been leaning towards a greater appetite for risk, as countries across Europe and the Americas started to reopen their economies. However, a degree of pessimism has returned to the markets, with investors taking stock of the gloomy picture painted by Fed officials who warned of tough times ahead for the economy.
