During the passing week the most interesting stories from the online trading industry included details on new technological features and business ventures as well as punitive regulatory actions. We bring here some of the most important ones.
Blockchain FX
One of the stories with the most potential to change the nature of the market one day involved FXCH, a Dublin-headquartered blockchain startup founded by a team of institutional FX veterans looking to fill the gap left by major banks pulling out of the prime brokerage market.
At the newly established clearing house, members can submit trades transacted on any institutional FX platform to be cleared and settled by FXCH. It recently cleared the first ever institutional spot-FX transaction using a distributed ledger for settlement.
Delving deep
On Tuesday MetaQuotes officially released its latest MetaTrader 5 web platform with the company adding the market depth display feature to MT5. Market depth on a web-based platform is a feature that makes MetaTrader 5 stand out from its peers.
CEO of MetaQuotes, Renat Fatkhullin, said: ”We currently see the explosive growth in the popularity of desktop MetaTrader 5 with support for hedging. We expect the web version of the product to spark similar excitement, since it is an excellent opportunity for traders to try the most advanced platform on the market by simply opening a new browser tab.”
New benchmark
On Wednesday we introduced the first few samples from the traffic indices – a new cross-industry benchmark, created with a methodological formula that matriculates data from three main sources: brokers’ trading volumes, brokers’ traffic data, and insider information.
The data showed that while almost three quarters (73.7%) of online trades are still being made on desktop systems, mobile has been gaining market share slowly, increasing by about 1% since March, both in Japan and internationally.
TempletonFX
On Thursday we reported that London based stock brokerage Templeton Securities, which has been around since 2006, has decided to expand its services into FX and CFDs trading with a new subsidiary named TempletonFX.
Elaborating on the expansion of the offering of Templeton Securities, the co-founder and director of the brokerage Mike Andrews explained: “For us the move made sense, because we can bring our existing clients from Templeton Markets into our AlphaPro platform. They can thereafter use their stock portfolio as margin to trade leveraged products. This helps to diversify our investors’ portfolios and maximizes their trading experience.”
Troubles in binaryland
On Friday two binary options related news items came to light.
First, the operator of binary options brokerage brand of TechFinancials, OptionFair, has been fined by CySEC. The amount of the penalty against B.O. Tradefinancials Ltd is €138,000 and as explained by CySEC , it is related to multiple compliance issues.
Second, we reported that fellow Cyprus-headquartered binary options broker OptionRally is undergoing some major changes as 120 employees were let go.
Earlier in the week, the Australian watchdog stressed to a number of brokerages that they are not allowed to advertise to or onboard Australian residents.The watchdog has issued notices to forty companies which have been engaging in unregulated activities in the land down under.
