Trading Technology for Retail FX  The FX market offers many advantages to active traders – 24 hour trading, low transaction costs, the ability to earn interest on overnight positions, plus deep liquidity from a $5.3 trillion/day market.   One of the most important advantages though is the abundance of top notch technology and trading platforms that are offered completely free to traders by FX brokers.     FXCM, one of the largest FX brokers in the world, offers an array of free platforms and technology that allow for advanced system trading, an increasingly popular trend in FX trading.    …...

Agency Cross on CME Direct On June 9th the CME launched Agency Cross on CME Direct. Agency Cross, also known as non-block trading, allows brokers to trade ClearPort products directly into Globex in non-block sizes. Block trading restrictions have become a major area of contention for many IBs. Agency Cross functionality is a welcomed addition for many brokers and traders, besides being a necessary addition by the CME to keep up with ICE. Agency Cross was rolled out to little fanfare as many firms were not even aware of it’s introduction. This was more of a soft launch for the…...

Traditionally, counterparties executing swaps transactions in the unregulated Over-The-Counter (“OTC”) marketplace maintained entire teams of staff devoted to the credit or delivery risk of a counter-party. Inclusive in this regime was the preeminent notion that brokers never held client funds of any kind. This key discrepancy may cause various regulatory outtrades between regulators and parties in the Introducing Broker regime, most notably the legacy swap broker and the traditional Introducing Broker (“IB”). With the move to central counter-party clearing, it is likely that legacy swaps firms will see a cost-shift to that of compliance.  The rules promulgated in response to…...