Former Alpari UK executive Stanislav Efremov is unveiling a new venture focused on the FX industry. After spending some time at ICM Capital as Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Efremov has founded Make Capital Group. The company includes a hedge fund offering for private and corporate investors, a prime offering for institutional brokers and a retail brokerage firm specifically designed for professional traders and money managers.
The company is based on the Cayman Islands, a jurisdiction that is not popular in the FX industry, but very much so with hedge funds.
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Elaborating on the jurisdiction choice, Efremov explained to Finance Magnates: “Our research into the institutional world shows that brokerage houses and Professional IBs are quite open to offshore opportunities. They trust our Directors’ expertise as we have been working for more than 10 years in the prop-trading and brokerage world. We also believe that there is a place for ethical brokers who place as high a value on their own integrity and reputation as they do on regulation.”
“The regulation in the Cayman Islands is considered strong and reliable. Incorporation in the Cayman Islands allows the Group to benefit from offshore tax rates including zero corporate tax and that is why we would rather keep the Group incorporated there. The other regulatory regimes that are interesting to our business in terms of corporate structure include FINMA in Switzerland and the UK FCA,” Efremov explained.
Hedge Fund
The company shared with Finance Magnates that it has a set of 68 fully automated strategies based on long-term signals and artificial intelligence (AI). All the strategies operate independently and are fully automated on both the opening and closing sides.
“We use 10 years of tick by tick data to calculate historical back-testing and also introduce the negative slippage in our tests that is in line with our live results and inevitable in real markets. The main strategy has been running for 4 years now and we are happy to see that live results match our prediction models,” Efremov said.
Institutional Business
After careful research of the market, Make Capital Prime is focusing on professional IBs who would like to convert their businesses into white labels or stand-alone brokerage houses.
Mr Efremov elaborates: “Some companies have been efficiently working as Marketing Agents for many years and have developed their own marketing & recruitment programs. At the same time many of them do not have their own technology, trading and Risk Management tools, web site, CRM, client and IB portals. The Make Capital technology team provides all the mentioned products either as a single package or such components as they require.”
“Existing brokers are mainly interested in Make Capital Liquidity that is unique in the institutional world and includes very tight spreads, above-average market depth and low commissions.
We have invested a lot into our technical infrastructure so we use our main datacentre in LD4, London as well as dedicated routing to several major datacentres around the globe. That gives us a huge advantage in trading markets as our connections are very fast and stable so execution delays or unexpected network connection problems have been all but eliminated,” Efremov explained.
Make Capital states that it is operating in a true A-Book, Non-Dealing-Desk (NDD) execution mode.
“We are proud to say that we do not have a dealing team at all. The execution is fully automated via an internal ECN system and we provide our clients with full statistics about execution speeds, slippage and partial fills. We also have Direct Market Access (DMA) channels that allow us to execute Futures-based trades with Exchanges and other Hedge Funds who act as market makers,” said the CEO of Make Capital Group.
Retail Brokerage for High Net Worth Clients
The company’s focus on money management and prop-trading drives it to focus its retail brokerage on other money managers and professional traders. These traders clearly understand the benefits of working with Make Capital as it provides them with tight spreads, low commissions and market depth.
A typical contract in PRO is a money manager who controls between $200,000 and $500,000 in funds that do not have their own white label setup yet. Smaller clients will see the same quality spreads and execution as professionals but their commissions will be slightly higher and will fully depend on the volume they generate.
