FXstreet.com (Barcelona) – The pair is quoting at 1.3188 at the time of writing after having hit intraday highs at 1.3216 during the European session. From yesterday’s close, the euro is gaining 0.35% against the U.S. dollar.

The euro is being boosted by a renovated risk-on mood in the markets, after yesterday most countries in the EU agreed to tighter budget controls and the Greek Prime Minister declared his commitment to get an agreement with bondholders. Strong German unemployment data released today has also contributed to encourage confidence in the European economy.

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FXCM takes $75 million credit facility

NEW YORK, December 20, 2011 FXCM Inc. (NYSE: FXCM), a leading online provider of foreign exchange, or FX, trading and related services, today announced that FXCM Holdings LLC has entered into a three year revolving credit facility with Bank of America, N.A., as Administrative Agent and several lenders from time to time parties thereto. The credit agreement provides for a $75 million revolving credit facility that may be increased during its three year term by up to $75 million for a total of up to $150 million.

“We are pleased to announce the credit facility which will provide us the increased liquidity and financial flexibility that will allow us to continue to grow our business both organically and through acquisitions.” said Drew Niv, Chief Executive of FXCM.
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NFA is doing an amazingly effective job at spitting in the well it drinks from. In fact NFA behaves not as a regulator but as a controlling shareholder of its members – as it basically does whatever it wants when it comes to requirements and ‘membership’ fees. NFA just declared a new ‘dividend’ for itself by aggressively raising membership fees which for some strange reason will now be in the region of 2% of forex broker’s gross (!) revenue instead of being a flat yearly fee like up until now. To the best of my knowledge NFA is the only forex dictator regulator charging percentage of volume and/or revenue instead of just charging same membership fee from everyone.

Question is why NFA needs so much money? Is that because of the aggressive forex brokers consolidation in the US which led to the decrease of number of NFA members while leading to increase in revenue for the bigger brokers?

Or is it because NFA itself posed amazing number of restrictions and reporting requirements over its members in the past year or so that it itself cannot cope with the scope of work stemming from those requirements?

The whole NFA decision making structure is nontransparent and it’s not clear how those decisions are made. CEOs of major forex brokers reside in various positions in some of NFA’s committees however it’s unclear what power they actually have when it comes to making decisions such as this one. More often than not it was suggested that major brokers are behind these ludicrous requirements as they are trying to oust smaller competitors.

Whatever the case is NFA is acting like a dictator once again instead of acting in the best of interest  of ALL its members – small and big.

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China is showing positive signs of further liberalising its currency. Recently the worlds second largest economy opened up doors for Yuan forwards and is now boosting ties with South Korea.

South Korea and China have agreed to expand their currency swap agreement to the equivalent of $56.5 billion in the face of global uncertainty and financial turmoil.

The existing won-yuan swap arrangement reached in April 2009 was worth the equivalent of $33.5 billion at the current won-dollar exchange rate.

The central Bank of Korea (BoK) said its new deal with the People’s Bank of China would last until October 25, 2014.

The agreement came a week after South Korea and Japan signed a deal to increase their currency swap agreement to the equivalent of $70 billion from $13 billion.

A currency swap allows central banks to exchange their currencies with each other in case of a liquidity crunch.

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Moscow will be showcasing the 12th International Exhibition MOSCOW FOREX EXPO 2011 on the 18th and 19th of November at the renowned Radisson Slavyanskaya hotel.

The Forex markets have been continuing to show strength (BIS survey 2010) and Russia places itself as a key participant of overall daily volumes, although FX is not a regulated asset class the daily FX volumes traded on the countries bourse – MICEX are well into the $10 billion mark.

The exhibition is hosted by Finexpo an established events and marketing agency in financial markets, in addition to Moscow the group organises events across Asia, Europe and the US.

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London 31/08/2011 - Spot gold prices drifted back on Wednesday morning in Europe, waiting eagerly for a raft of US economic data, particularly US employment figures.

The US ADP non-farm Employment figures are the key indicator – these are expected to show that only 100,000 jobs were added in August, versus 114,000 in July. Figures also due this afternoon are the August Chicago PMI, July factory orders, and August Challenger job cuts.

In data so far, the EU CPI was 2.5 percent, as expected.

“With EU CPI stable and below its April peak at 2.8 percent, the ECB may feel it has room to ease monetary policy again – in turn that could weaken the euro and help support the dollar,” said William Adams, an analyst at FastMarkets.

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PFGBEST Receives China Banking Regulatory Commission Approval

PFGBEST is moving on official approval from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (“CBRC”) to build on the PFGBEST brand in China. The CBRC is the primary banking regulator in China, supervising banks and non-bank institutions and their business operations within the country.

“We are happy and delighted with this approval from CBRC. As one of the first U.S. Futures & Forex firms to receive CBRC approval, we are fulfilling our long-term commitment to this fast growing market,” said PFGBEST President and Chief Operating Officer Russ Wasendorf, Jr. “China is a vast, dynamic market and this permits us to use our talent and technology leadership to serve the demand through the region for global foreign exchange with many exchange-listed products. In our view, China has the potential to establish one of the largest financial services industries in the world,” he said.

Mr. Kem Chong, PFGBEST Chief Representative in China said: “CBRC’s approval allows us to conduct market research and promote our most successful trader education programs. It will help us to continue expanding relationships with investors and traders, financial media, academic and technology partners, and regulators in mainland China.” Kem Chong has been with PFGBEST for six years.

More info here.

eToro continues to innovate with CopyTrader, a new function in the OpenBook social networking platform. CopyTrader allows a user to follow other successful traders on the eToro social network. This is a bold move by eToro — they are one of the first brokers in my knowledge to allow such a feature. Social networking is here to stay and those who embrace it will come out ahead. There are several players who are leading the social networking/trade following aspect in the forex markets— we’ll analyze 3 of them today for our readers. More here …

The IBTimes Trading Awards results fall into two major areas:

• Qualitative rankings: recognizing brokers by client satisfaction at the continent and country level
• Panel of experts: based on the judges’ proven expertise

Qualitative rankings were further divided into five voting sub-categories: Trading Platform, Forex Execution, Customer Service, Funding Department and Education.

This year’s winners include: Alpari UK, Ava FX, FXDD, FX Open, GFT, GO Markets, HY Markets, IBFX, MB Trading, Oanda, Tadawul FX, TFIfx and VantageFX.

The top firm in each sub-category, continent and country received a Best Broker Award, the 2 runner-up firms were honored with an Excellence Award.

The scores were first collected through votes on IBTimes.com, winners were subsequently selected by a panel of judges from IBTimes’ editorial team as well as independent experts from Forex Magnates, a highly acclaimed Forex Website.

The full results to the 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards can be viewed at the official awards website: http://www.ibtimes.com/awards/trading-awards-2011/

About Forex Magnates

Forex Magnates is managed by Michael Greenberg a highly acclaimed Forex Expert. Forex Magnates covers both the institutional as well as the retail sides of the Forex Industry. www.forexmagnates.com

About the IBTimes Trading Awards

The IBTimes Trading Awards builds on the successes of last year’s Awards, the 2010 FX Traders’ Choice Awards. They were awarded based on the votes of IBTimes’ readers collected by Forex DataSource, a Forex market research firm. The goal of the FX Traders’ Choice Awards was to empower traders with reliable information and help them select reputable brokers, as traders decided the winners.

This year, The 2011 IBTimes Trading Awards continues to give public recognition to those brokers and financial service providers while increasing the scope of the awards to cover all major asset classes including Stocks, Futures and Options. The awards also reflect The International Business Times’ global identity and include votes on financial service providers from around the world that provide services in multiple languages.

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Why did you develop and launch MT5? Many estimate that this is your take on the stocks/indices/futures markets after you conquered the whole forex market and that is why it was rumored to be priced at $500k and when acceptance wasn’t satisfying the pricing changed to the MT4 levels, is that so?

Well, one of the reasons for developing MetaTrader 5 was our desire to expand into new markets. Now we are actively working in this direction and cooperate with some stock exchanges. This is not a fast process, because not everything depends on us. But we are moving forward.

The second reason was that we knew that a platform better than MetaTrader 4 could be created. However, it was impossible to implement new functions within the architecture of the old platform. Therefore, we, as always, started to develop a new platform from scratch. This approach implies a long development process, but it gives you a free hand, and you can implement almost anything you want.

As for the rumors about the price of the platform, they have nothing to do with reality. We haven’t changed the prices, and we have never planned to cut them. Moreover, we think these prices are probably low and we are now discussing the idea of raising the price of MetaTrader 5.

Can you disclose some details about MT5′s pricing and number of servers sold so far? Can you also specify how many MT4 systems have you sold so far, how many brokers are using the MT4 (this is something everyone in the market would really like to know)?

As I’ve said, we want to revise the prices of the MetaTrader 5 platform. Therefore I wouldn’t like to disclose them, because they may become invalid in a few months. As for our clients, we have sold MetaTrader 5 to more than 50 companies in one year. And over 400 MetaTrader 4 platforms have been sold in 6 years. (That’s 400 different clients, there are many more servers than that as each brokers has White Labels, Franchises, IBs, etc  - MG).

What differentiates MT5 from MT4?

Many people think that since the terminals of MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 are similar, the platforms are also similar. But this is wrong. These are two different platforms. There are a lot of minor details and some conceptual differences.

First of all, the platforms are based on completely different trading systems. MetaTrader 5 uses a system adopted by exchanges. Secondly, MetaTrader 5 is based on a new architecture, which provides greater flexibility and productivity. New automated trading with MQL5 is much more powerful than its predecessor, but unfortunately it is not compatible with MQL4. MetaTrader 5 also offers absolutely new mobile trading. If we go into the details, we’ll just get a huge article, or even a series of articles. So let’s leave it at that.

I saw you release MT5 for iPhone, are you planning on doing the same or are the new developments are aimed only at MT5?

Yes, it’s just one of those differences of MetaTrader 5 from MetaTrader 4. The old platform includes a good mobile trading. However, this market is strongly dependent on the market of mobile devices, which has changed dramatically. The rather good Windows Mobile has been replaced by the even better iOS and Android OS. Therefore, we are developing our mobile terminals specifically for these mobile platforms.

We are going to make MetaTrader 5 mobile terminals even more functional than the MetaTrader 4 Mobile. Increased functionality and performance of mobile devices provide greater freedom, and we want to use it all, to provide traders with maximum opportunities. Of course, all this will be available only to MetaTrader 5 users. Further development of mobile trading for MetaTrader 4 is not planned.

What are your future plans for Metaquotes? Do you intend to organically develop the platform further or do you intend to start acquiring competitors or other vertical acquisitions (like bridge providers, MT development firms, etc)?

Our next plans include further development of our trading platforms and expansion to the Exchange. From our point of view, there is still enough work to do.

What do you think of the rising popularity of MT4/MT5 bridges and bridges firms? Why don’t you develop a bridge of your own?

Popularity is an excellent indicator of demand. That is why we do create bridges – we have created our own bridge for MT5.