Forex.com is one of my favorite brokers for a number of reasons – their solid regulation, low spreads and quite decent execution of market and pending orders being amongst them. Furthermore, the bro... Read More »
FXCM is one of the word biggest forex brokers, transacting over $300 billion per month on average. FXCM is one of the few forex brokers listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It is reliable and heavi... Read More »
Oanda is one of the most popular forex brokers around the world. It is registered with 7 regulatory organs and offers consistently low spreads, deep market liquidity and excellent execution, thus beco... Read More »
Dukascopy is a Swiss bank, offering NDD forex trading through the SWFX Swiss FX Marketplace technology. What platforms does Dukascopy support? Dukascopy Bank offers a few platforms that provide... Read More »
MIG BANK, formerly known as MIG INVESTMENTS, was established in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 2003. Since then the company has managed to establish itself as a respected forex broker and has gathered a s... Read More »
FxPro is a fast expanding, Cyprus based ECN forex broker, offering its customers a user-friendly market access via the MT4 and cTrader platforms. What platforms does FxPro support? If you head ... Read More »
Alpari UK is part of the Alpari Group – one of the largest forex brokers with branches all over the world. Alpari UK is regulated by the FSA – UK and offers a couple of trading platforms, along wi... Read More »
Interbank FX (IBFX) is a US forex broker, which is a member of the NFA, and is licensed and regulated by the CFTC. For all we know, IBFX was the first forex broker to launch the Metatrader 4 platform ... Read More »
Swissquote Bank SA is a recognized public bank regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). The company services over 200,000 accounts worldwide from multiple locations in Sw... Read More »
FX Solutions (also known as FXSOL) is a US broker that opened for business back in 2001. It offers the a choice of trading platforms, fixed spreads and commission-free trading. What platforms does FX ... Read More »
ThinkForex is a New Zealand based forex broker that offers a selection of trading platforms and excellent trading conditions. What platforms does ThinkForex support? When you sign up with Think... Read More »
MB Trading is a US broker founded back in 1999. The broker is a member of the NFA and is regulated by the CFTF. What platforms does MB Trading support? If you like to have choice, then MB Trading will... Read More »
FXDD is an ECN broker, established in New York in 2003. It supports a number of different platforms, allowing traders of all skill level and portfolio size to trade currencies and commodities (e.g. Go... Read More »
DF Markets is a relatively “young” broker, found in the UK by the Bulgarian broker DeltaStock. DF Markets is regulated by the FSA (UK). The broker offers the same services and trading conditions a... Read More »
Interactive brokers is a US forex broker with a long history and track record of success. What I like about it is that it’s a true ECN broker offering tight spreads under heavy regulation. Wh... Read More »
Go Markets is an Australia-based NDD forex broker, founded in 2006. The broker is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and offers a variety of platforms – MT4, MT... Read More »
AAAfx is a Greece-based forex broker that is would not be anything special if it weren’t for its direct integration with Zulutrade – the biggest forex signals platform in the world. In fact, the p... Read More »
Saxo Bank is a strictly regulated Danish broker established in 1992. It offers good trade execution through the MT4 and its own SaxoTrader platforms. What platforms does Saxo Bank support? Saxo... Read More »
Trading 212 is the British branch of the Bulgarian broker Avus Capital. The broker operates in accordance with the European Financial Directive MiFID, and is licensed and regulated in 8 countries. Wha... Read More »
Ava FX is an Irish market maker, founded in 2006 and regulated in the European Union, Australia and Japan. It offers a wide selection of trading platforms to suit every trader’s style, along with ac... Read More »
With the US presidential elections around the corner, and campaigns in full swing, TradeStation, the company which acquired IBFX in 2011, is releasing an Elections Performance indicator – a tool that illustrates the stock market performance for each US presidential cycle since 1924.
The indicator plots the cumulative stock market performance on a monthly basis during each 4-year presidential cycle. The closing price of the January monthly bar following an election year is used as the starting baseline performance price, and at the end of each presidential administration cycle, the indicator draws a vertical line, and displays the stock market performance for the respective cycle as a percentage. If you are into long-term stock analysis which is based on external data and factors, then you can definitely benefit from the Elections Performance.
The only downside is that it can’t really predict who’s going to win the next elections – and if it could, it would save both Obama and Romney a ton of money and bad-mouthing. Just kidding. Ah, the drama of politics…
The indicator is built in EasyLanguage®, TradeStation’s proprietary programing language, and is available for download for free here.
“In view of the upcoming election, we thought it would be interesting to examine the stock market’s long-term historical performance under various presidential administrations,” said Michael Burke, TradeStation’s Vice President of Client Training and Education. “TradeStation is an excellent tool for these types of studies, allowing you to create statistical or data-mining projects to measure performance on just about any market idea or concept. We offer a number of pre-built economic data sets – including interest rates, economic indicators and market statistics – that are kept up to date on the TradeStation website.”
TradeStation is an online brokerage services and trading platform provider working with individual and institutional customers. The company’s platform offers electronic order execution and enables clients to design, test, optimize, monitor and automate their own custom equities, options, futures and forex trading strategies.
In June 2011 TradeStation was acquired by the Japanese Monex Group. A few months later, TradeStation on its turn acquired the Interbank FX broker and merged its subsidiary TradeStation Forex with IBFX.
It seems that the forex scene has its new power couple: Barclays Stockbrokers is teaming up with FXCM to launch Barclays Margin FX.
Barclays is one of the oldest and largest financial services providers in the world – with more than 300 years of experience in banking, it surely has some stories to tell. FXCM, on the other hand, is an innovative retail forex trading providers, technology- and strategy-wise. The company has just launched its start-up accelerator FXCM Ventures and just a couple of months before that it was the first broker to start offering the NinjaTrader platform.
Barclays Margin FX will grant offer traders some excellent trading conditions – e.g. access to 50 currency pairs, live streaming quotes, extremely fast NDD (No Dealing Desk) execution, and competitive spreads. The platform will be powered by FXCM’s desktop and web-based versions of Trading Station, which allows trading from charts and one-click trading to enhance and speed up the trading process even more. Amongst the other features of the software are the wide range of order types, the outstanding charting package, and strategy back-testing capabilities.
Along with this, Barclays Margin FX customers will have access to Barclay’s research data, as well as FXCM’s educational resources and tutorials, trading signals and market sentiment data.
Paul Inkster, Head of Product, Barclays Stockbrokers, said: “We want to provide the best retail forex trading experience in the market, and the power of this offering comes in the partnership; by combining FXCM’s cutting-edge and award-winning technology with the size, strength and expertise of Barclays, one of the world’s leading forex banks, we are able to offer a unique proposition for traders. The partnership provides retail FX traders with access to professional-quality research and tools to help them identify and execute trading opportunities.”
“We are extremely excited about this partnership and one that we think will create an offering that is superior to any other offering from our competitors in the UK,” said Drew Niv, CEO of FXCM. “It’s always complimentary when one of the largest and most well established financial services providers chooses your trading technology, platform, and recourses to offer as its own.”
And there’s no reason for Niv not to be excited – the platform has all the prerequisites to succeed. The only downside? It will only be available in the United Kingdom. If you’re not in Britain, you can look into other white labels of FXCM – DIF Broker, Bourse Direct and FXCM Canada.
To learn more about FXCM’s trading conditions and platforms, click here: FXMC Review.
Zulutrade, one of the biggest platforms for social trading and following signals, is now working with yet another broker – the South-African ACM Gold. The network is already working with approximately 50 brokers, including FXCM, Forex.com, Interactive Brokers and Dukascopy Bank.
This new partnership will allow ACM Gold’s customers to follow signals from ZuluTrade’s providers and copy these signals in their own accounts. Currently, ZuluTrade has over 55,000 signal providers who are automatically ranked based on various criteria like maturity, exposure, drawdown, and reliability. What’s more, the leaders on the network get paid for their signals, which is an excellent motivation to provide quality insight in order to attract more and more followers.
Crowdsourcing is a global tendency these days and the forex trading sphere is no exception – more and more traders turn to automated or semi-automated trading. Trusting the wisdom and experience of successful traders, pretty much anyone can start making money by copying trades and saving time on research and analysis.
“We welcome ACM Gold to our elite portfolio of brokers and its clients to our family of ZuluTraders,” said Leon Yohai, founder and CEO of ZuluTrade. “We believe that ZuluTrade will become the favorite way of forex trading for beginners and veteran forex traders alike once they discover the advantages generated by the combination of our algorithmically evaluated community of top traders and the security of keeping their funds with their broker of choice, such as ACM Gold.”
The collaboration with ZuluTrade is not exactly a groundbreaking experience for ACM Gold – the broker already offers its very own platform for automated trading, where clients can follow the broker’s best traders and automatically copy their transaction. The platform also comes with comprehensive educational resources and a minimum investment requirement of $250 – so anyone can start trading right away, irrelevant of their skill level and portfolio size.
ACM Gold is a financial services provider that offers forex, futures and options trading to individual and institutional clients. The broker is licensed and regulated by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of Mauritius, as well as by the Financial Services Board (FSB) in South Africa, and operates out of offices in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
The guys from MetaQuotes Software Corp. have been keeping busy tweaking and pushing the Metatrader 5 (MT5) platform these days. Just last week it was announced that MT5 has teamed up with HotspotFX to expand the platform’s pool of liquidity providers for forex and CFD trading, and a mere few days before that a major upgrade for the MT5 Android app was released and the application now features 30 technical indicators for enhanced trading.
It appears, though, that forex and CFD’s are not MetaQuotes Software Corp.’s only focus; the company is really pushing hard to establish its Metatrader 5 (MT5) platform as a leading software application for trading stock and commodities.
Just today, it was announced that MT5 has been endorsed by Brazil’s BM&FBOVESPA – one of the biggest exchanges in Latin America. The endorsement will allow brokerage houses that are members of the BM&FBOVESPA to provide trading services to investors using MT5 through a specially designed gateway.
In 2012, MT5 was certified by four more international stock exchanges: Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, Singapore Mercantile Exchange, Mauritius Global Board of Trade and the Russian RTS stock exchange. Having in mind the platform’s obvious advantages, this comes as no surprise: MT5 offers a complete solution for financial markets trading, including a flexible back office module, a state-of-art front end system, and technical analysis tools. Along with stock, the platform allows for the trading of equities, futures and OTC derivatives.
Apparently, MetaQuotes Software Corp. is recognizing the potential of the region – back in May the company opened a representative office in Sao Paulo to reinforce its positions on the Latin American market.
“We have created a successful platform for high quality that meets all requirements of the BM&FBOVESPA and we will continue with our efforts to offer even more opportunities in our platform for the exchange members. This promising market has a strong demand for our technology and we want to satisfy you,” said Gaies Chreis, president of MetaQuotes Software Corp.
The first Brazillian broker to start offering to investors trading via MT5 is XP Investimentos. Alexandre Marchetti, director of operations for XP, shared his enthusiasm of the news: “The Metatrader 5 platform will add tremendous value to customers of XP. It is a fundamental trading system for professional traders that will help our customers maximize their strategies and profit!”.
As the world of marketing and advertising struggles to find new channels and tools to get through the filters consumers create for themselves, things sometime get to extremes. In February this year, the Danish forex broker Saxo Bank engaged in an interesting campaign: to introduce and promote its mobile trading apps, Saxo got Swedish wing suit jumper and stuntman Martin Rosén to execute a trade from an iPhone – while in free fall.
Rosén jumped off Hutchinson Peak in South Africa and managed to buy 1,000,000 EUR/USD Spot at a price of 1.26969. The trade was confirmed while he was still in mid-air and later on Saxo used the footage for a TV ad spot. Before you rush to find the video on YouTube, I’ve done the dirty work for you; here’s the video itself:
Saxo’s stunt will probably stay the forex industry most extreme transaction for a while, but British professional trader Anton Kreil has set his mind on giving a whole new meaning to the term “extreme trading”. If all goes well, in 2014 Kreil will try to make a trade from – drumroll – Open Space. The trader plans to travel to Space on the Lynx XCOR MKII shuttle with Space Expedition Corporation (SCX). One of the purposes of this trip (except for having loads of fun, du-uh) is to set two world records – for the first financial transaction made in Space, and for the highest financial transaction. Kreil intends to trade the Corporate Sponsors Stock from the cockpit at an altitude of 103KM above Earth. An Investment Bank / Broker will be relaying the order through the exchange via their Direct Market Access (DMA) trading platform.
Kreil will take off together with the ex NASA astronaut Colonel Rick Searfross from one of the two of SXC’s spaceports – in the Mohave desert or on the Dutch island of Curacao.
Anton Kreil in astronaut training
On his website Kreil, who has already begun his astronaut training, shares his excitement about this upcoming event.
“I get to train as an astronaut. In fact, after the whole experience is complete, I actually will be an astronaut. It sounds strange to say it. “I am going to be an Astronaut”, he says.
Even though I’m not gonna be the one looking at our lovely planet from Space, trading my way into the Galaxy, I am really excited about Anton Kreil’s plans so I will keep an eye on the story and will report when there are any news.
In the meantime, the trader is still looking for sponsors, and he is in negotiations with some brokers and investment banks. Whoever gets to be the main sponsor of Kreil’s flight will surely get quite some media exposure – and while it’s probably be really expensive, they’ll get to brand themselves as “that awesome company, which made possible the first trade from space”. If I were Saxo Bank, I’d definitely consider it before their BASE jump trading is no longer such a big deal.
