Japanese retail FX firm FXCrown, despite laying claim to a smaller market share in a market which not only represents 35% of global retail FX order flow but is dominated by domestic firms, has been strengthening its offering recently, with the latest development making it the FX broker to offer the Russian Ruble to Japanese traders.
Starting from today, clients of the company who use the TightFX service on the MetaTrader 4 platform, will be able to trade with two new pairs: USD/RUB and EUR/RUB.
The company did not mention the particular reasons for the introduction of the new pairs, but we can speculate that among possible factors is the high ruble volatility, which has spurred interest in trading with all ruble-related instruments. It will be interesting to see whether the Japanese FX traders will show appetite for the Russian currency which has been battered by geopolitical factors, as well as falling oil prices. In October only, Russia’s Central Bank spent USD 30 billion to stem the fall of the ruble – on Friday the bank signaled more interventions were in store given the financial risks. This means that more volatility and more interesting market developments loom for the Russian ruble, with the clients of FXCrown to be able to trade on these.
An interesting moment is that some of the market-dominating Japanese FX brokers, such as MONEX Group, DMM FX and GMO Click, have thus far eschewed ruble trading in on the domestic market. The same applies to international FX giants with operations in Japan, including FXCM, OANDA and Forex.com/GAIN Capital, which otherwise offer a very comprehensive array of trading instruments to their clients.
Another poignant aspect is that trading with the USD/RUB and EUR/RUB pairs are available on the MetaTrader 4 platform (TightFX), a solution that has been abandoned by two Japanese FX brokers – MONEX  and YJFX , over the past month. Apparently, FXCrown remains devoted to the ubiquitous trading platform, which it provides in a downloadable version to its clients. TightFX (MT4) offers trading with 50 currency pairs (the new additions including), with the broker boasting the low spreads on these instruments.
At the same time, FXCrown has made moves towards diversifying its portfolio of platforms.Iin the summer of 2014 it introduced cTrader, later refining it by including cAlgo.
The official press release by FXCrown  can be read on the corporate website.