Looking back at the most intriguing and popular industry news from the past week between 12th and 16th April on LeapRate.
Independent analytics and data firm New Change FX (NCFX) revealed its intention to make its premium crypto asset, FX, and precious metal market data accessible on blockchains via Chainlink. Blockchains will be able to access premium market data associated with roughly 2,300 currency pairs. Authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as well as the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), NCFX works to provide a live spot FX benchmark, as well as offering other forex reference rates. The company has recently been expanding its offerings to reflect the rising demand for financial market data.
smartTrade Technologies announced that 225 year-old Swiss Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd has integrated smartTrade’s in-house developed FX solution, LiquidityFX, into its banking platform, to offer enhanced FX trading services to its clients. LiquidityFX is an end-to-end solution with connectivity to more than 130 liquidity providers. The platform offers aggregation, pricing, risk management, distribution and post-trade.  LiquidityFX supports a range of instruments including FX Spot, Forwards, Swaps, NDF, Options and Precious Metals.
FXCM Group, LLC, an international provider of forex and CFD trading services, reported expanding its Single Share CFD and Stock Basket product lines. The broker is continuing to enhance its offering with the addition of shares from Hong Kong’s primary exchange the HKEX, and an additional 50 NYSE and NASDAQ listed companies to its US Share CFD offering. Trading shares with FXCM do not have minimum commission values, which allows clients to start with trade sizes as small as 1/10th of a share on US, DE, FR and UK listed companies.
Data analytics company BMLLÂ announced hiring Masami Johnstone as Senior Client Advisor and Simon Ellis as Head of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances. Johnstone will work on developing senior relationships in the capital markets community on the buyside, well as on the sellside and Ellis will be responsible for the development of the wider BMLL ecosystem.
LeapRate met with Stavros Lambouris, CEO at global forex broker HYCM International to speak about the rise of retail trading and how HYCM responds to this trend. Stavros said to us that in many ways the pandemic was the perfect storm of the retail trading industry. He said, “Traders are naturally attracted to volatility, but it was the combination of volatility and almost everything trading at a discount, as well as all that free time everyone suddenly had, that brought so many new participants in.”
ATFX launched its advanced research and analysis led service platform – AT Premier. The platform was initially released in the Middle East region. AT Premiere was designed as a comprehensive, multi-dimensional, intelligence-delivery platform to provide market analysis, education, signals, news and copy trading. Powered by dedicated internal intelligence tools, AT Premier, serves as a one-stop-solutions hub for beginners, professional traders, market analysts, money managers and introducing brokers.
Online CFD broker Plus500 released a trading update for the first quarter of 2021. For the three-month period ended on 31 March, the brokerage reported $203.2 million in revenue with a massive 121% jump compared to the last quarter of 2020. Plus500 also revealed that the number of active clients reached 269,743 in the first quarter, compared to 215,305 in Q4 of 2020. The onboarded new clients during Q1 was 89,406, compared to 50,314 in Q4 of 2020. The company also reported EBITDA of $121.7 million in the first quarter, compared to $19.9 million during the Q4 of 2020.
IS Prime, added MT5 to its White Label solutions to provide retail FX brokers with more choices. This new addition further expands IS Prime’s White Label offering, which also includes MT4 and IS Prime’s White Label, Terminus. The company’s offering is made up of back office and risk systems as well as a full broker package from IS Risk Analytics including bridge services.
Online trading provider CFI Financial Group introduced Fractional Shares, a new trading feature that would enable broader and more flexible participation in the financial markets. The new trading-centric feature provides budget investors or in general, traders looking for more flexibility, the ability to trade a fraction of a share. CFI’s clients can trade as low as 10% of a stock on a range of more than 300 CFDs on stocks with the numbers likely increasing in the near future.
London-based broker TP ICAP plc has just announced the launch of the brand Parameta Solutions. Parameta Solutions is the new brand for the data and analytics and post-trade offerings of TP ICAP. The unit allows clients with unbiased OTC content and proprietary data, in-depth insights across price discovery, risk management, benchmark and indices and pre and post-trade analytics. The new solution will help traders control counterparty and regulatory risks through an expanding range of tools that manage balance sheet exposure, as well as compression and optimisation services.
Singapore Exchange (SGX) has just released its market statistics for March 2021. The exchange reported its highest securities market turnover since March last year. It registered 50% MoM rise in to S$38.7 billion. Securities daily average value (SDAV) climbed 24% compared to February 2021 reaching S$1.7 billion. It also marked 18% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase to S$1.52 billion. The ETF volume on SGX reached 3%MoM with S$516 million. In the first quarter, the ETF turnover gained 34% compared to the previous one to S$1.6 billion, with combined assets-under-management (AUM) of all 30 listed ETFs at S$8.99 billion.
