FXStreet, one of the largest Forex portals on the web, is slowly but steadily increasing its market grip and presence - after tapping myfxbook and forexcrunch to its advertising network FXS has recently tapped FXTimes, another upcoming market commentary portal and launched the Trader Talk feature.
Those with good memory will remember that I wrote about FX Times when it just launched in November 2009. FX Times was CMS Forex's attempt at establishing its own forex portal. While it wasn't highly popular it did offer several nice tools and widgets which were used by other websites.
Since CMS Forex's retail client base was acquired by Gain many interesting things happened to the former CMS Forex group, in fact it split into several independent pieces. CMS Forex clients were moved to Gain Capital. CMS Forex itself is still registered as an RFED with CFTC and jointly with VT Systems will continue offering VT Trader as a charting package as well as for practice purposes while being Gain's IB. VT Trader itself will soon be launched by Gain Capital. And the last piece in the puzzle is the FX Times portal which has parted ways with CMS Forex group and is now an independent news and market analysis provider.
FXS is also growing quite nicely as can be seen by stats published on Francesc's blog and is from time to time launching new features such as Trader Talk - A New Forex & Market Digest News Feed For Market Talk Section. A team of experts and journalists monitor more than 50 sources including trading desks, broker platforms, big bank movements, private investors, and more in order to digest the most interesting events and offer FXstreet.com readers a useful and unique information feed.
FXS here is starting to rival with other forex advertising rings (there are only a couple of these) such as Mediacougar which unite several brands under one advertising umbrella and offer a more balanced and perhaps more effective deal for both advertisers and publishers. However I'm not a very big fan of monopolies and if FXS will tap more and more sites to its advertising network this may be a serious threat to smaller, independent, websites which won't have too many options left.
FXS seems to be on the right way here and I wouldn't be surprised if it followed EuroInvestor's acquisition path sooner than later.
