I heard news a few days ago that FXCM received a hefty fine for trading against customers, and now read some news that they were shut down in US. Is this true?
My question is, can one still use their historical pricing data? Thinking about it I`m not sure if one can trust their data.
All your questions have been asked and answered in this forum already
Just do some reading (and use the SEARCH feature), before you start typing.
And, in the future, questions about brokers belong in the Forex Brokers forum
You’ve been a member of this forum for long enough that you should know these things.
.
Ok. Sorry about that
Just as a little “aside”, Naz, since you ask: it wasn’t so much for “trading against their customers” (which many brokers do) as “for trading against their customers while deceiving the whole world with ever-repeated statements that their no-dealing-desk model meant that they [B][U]weren’t[/U][/B] trading against their customers.” That was the basis on which they attracted customers in the first place.
They were found to have been lying about that.
“Surprise, surprise”. :rolleyes:
In other words, just like most of their previous, very long and very adverse regulatory record of huge fines, over the last decade or so, [I]it related directly to their honesty and integrity[/I].
FXCM is really a big brand (whether they are scam or not). It has many offices over the world. Maybe the impacts from shareholders causes these things.
It doesn’t matter how big the brand is, you have to think about your trading fund safety. I already moved my cFD trading account to Hanseatic .
as I know Leucadia just took control of the board of directors, will keep the brand name FXCM, but change the company name to Global Broker.
I want to see how big brother can handle the present situation.
I have been trading on FXCM for 5 years, and I always trade against the majority of their customers. If you use their SSI indicator you will quickly see that most of FXCM’s customers are bad traders and spend most of their time on the wrong side of the trade.
Anyway, what they do behind the scene has not effected my account so I don’t really care
Very smart & astute tactic Dennis.
There are one or two likeminded individuals operating a similar game play in a thread down in the Melting Pot who find using that bias as part of their overall view very much in their favor.
Bad traders are everywhere; SSI indicator is good if you trade from MT4/trading station but if you use cTrader you can see the live retail traders sentiment by default. I moved to hanseatic due to negative balance protection and needed a broker who has large cFD collections as well as FX.
Account doesn’t matter If your broker lost the ability to pay you, many brokers did not pay when liberty reserve shut down, look at Alpari UK and IronFX they filed for bankruptcy and holding the payment of those unaffected accounts! A smart trader should move his/her account before such horrible situation.
Hi Agnes,
While part of FXCM’s settlement with the NFA and CFTC was to close our US subsidiary, there will be no changes for FXCM clients outside the US.
Since FXCM US has not been a contributor to overall profits for the firm over the past few years, FXCM will target significant cost cutting by closing the US entity. Specifically, withdrawing from this business will free approximately $52 million in capital. We will use the proceeds from the sale of the US accounts, as well as the large amount of regulatory capital currently tied up, to reduce the balance of our loan from Leucadia.
With the reduction of this loan balance, along with sales of non-core assets that were previously announced, FXCM could be in a position to fully pay off the Leucadia loan before the end of this year. As a result, FXCM will be in a better position to service our international customers and focus on our profitable subsidiaries: http://ir.fxcm.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1011502
Also, FXCM Group, LLC and its global subsidiaries and affiliates (FXCM UK, FXCM Australia, FXCM Germany, FXCM South Africa, etc.) will continue to offer forex and CFD trading services outside the US using the FXCM brand name.
It’s only the publicly traded company FXCM, Inc. (which owns 50.1% of FXCM Group with Leucadia owning the remaining 49.9%) that has changed its name to Global Brokerage, Inc. The change of Global Brokerage’s trading ticker symbol to “GLBR” went into effect at the opening of trading yesterday February 27, 2017 on NASDAQ, and the new CUSIP is 37891B109.
Hi Dennis,
First, thanks for being a client of FXCM all these years! I’m glad you have found our SSI indicator to be useful. 
While the nature of FXCM’s settlement with the US regulators prohibits me from commenting on the specifics, I want you to know we continue to stand by the quality of our trade execution in general and our No Dealing Desk (NDD) forex pricing in particular.
Consider what happened on January 15, 2015 with the SNB flash crash:
The majority of retail forex traders were long EUR/CHF when the Swiss National Bank made their surprise announcement to abandon the 1.2000 exchange rate floor they had established for the pair. Had FXCM been on the other side of client trades, we would have made money when EUR/CHF dropped and retail traders took massive losses on their long positions.
The moved wiped out those clients’ account equity as well as generated negative equity balances owed to FXCM of over $225 million. The caveat of our NDD model is that traders are offset one for one with a liquidity provider. When a client entered a EUR/CHF trade with FXCM, FXCM Inc. had an identical trade with our liquidity providers. During the historic move, liquidity became extremely scarce and shallow, which affected execution prices. This liquidity issue resulted in some clients having a negative balance.
While clients using NDD forex execution did not cover their margin call with us we still had to cover the same margin call with our liquidity providers. As a result, FXCM ended with a regulatory capital shortfall. Accordingly, FXCM needed to get a loan to cover this balance, which we did. For anyone that still thinks FXCM is running an FX dealing desk on our NDD model, the SNB event demonstrated that is not the case.
How does our NDD model work?
FXCM uses 16 liquidity providers to create a best bid best offer price stream for clients. LPs selected to price retail clients are forced to adhere to an extremely high standard of execution beyond just price including consistently low rejection rates, low latency, minimum quote sizes and high fill ratios even during market events.
We discuss in our UK execution study the criteria we use to rank our liquidity providers which you can see listed in question 13 of the FAQ. FXCM’s liquidity providers are ranked based on compliance to these standards which we identify as providing the best customer experience possible. Being a top ranked liquidity provider is important. Liquidity providers with the best pricing according to these rules may gain an advantage over other liquidity providers which could result in a large increase in orders captured. Poorly performing liquidity providers are ranked lower for order flow and ultimately could be removed from our platform until they return to compliance.
Also, the results of this study show FXCM UK retail client order prices to be better for FX than futures prices (74.97% of the time) and interbank prices(91.56% of the time).*
[I]* The study does not in away way attempt to represent that FXCM maintains a particular capacity or performance level. The figures in this study are provided for information purposes only, and are not intended for trading purposes or advice. FXCM is not liable for any information errors, incompleteness, or delays, or for any actions taken in reliance on information contained herein. Past results are not indicative of future performance.
Material Assumptions
FXCM’s Retail Clients are defined as individual, joint, and corporate accounts trading on our retail price stream.
The comparison to each of the Futures and Interbank data is made at the time that the FXCM client order is executed. Normal market slippage and slippage due to rejections by liquidity providers are already included by the time the FXCM client order is executed. However, there is an assumption that there is no slippage on the Futures or Interbank market data.
In order to maintain consistency, Futures Market data and Interbank data used the same acceptable ranges in market trades. The summary of findings is based on the assumption that the maximum acceptable difference between the FXCM price and the Interbank/Futures market price is 5 pips in either direction.
Fees that a participant would pay on the Futures or Interbank market, such as CME Exchange Fees, NFA Fees, FCM Fees, Clearing Fees, and other commissions, were excluded from the study. Similarly, FXCM Commissions are excluded from the study.[/I]
Thanks for the reply. However, I am not confident enough with the present situation. Most of the authority investigate once they get a complain but US authority investigates by themselves without any complain which gives us more confident.
You can’t deny that market capital/ability of FXCM is less than 5% than it was 2-3 years before. Any future massive volatility could end the ability to pay your client. And You don’t offer Negative balance protection.
I moved my General FX account under FCA with TickMill and they are offering lower spread as you guys did. I won’t change my decision unless you guys have proof in coming months. Wish you good luck.
Hi anges,
FXCM UK provides forex traders with up to $50,000 of negative balance protection. You can find full details in the Terms of Business.
You can view from the operating results released for Q4 2016 that FXCM had $202 million operating cash in our continuing operations, and our financials are audited by Ernst & Young, which is one of the top four ranked accounting firms in the world. How much operating cash does your existing broker have available? With FXCM, this information is publicly available, and on a regular basis, FXCM is required to submit financial reports to regulators.
Jason
FXCM issued a notice regarding questions by clients regarding their fears of a possible delisting of the broker by GLBR from NASDAQ. According to their announcement there won’t be an effect.
I hope it will be so, there has been enough drama already. 
Hi mlawson,
FXCM has no responsibility or obligation for Global Brokerage’s (GLBR) debt or other obligations. Accordingly, the recent news and any adverse developments at GLBR have no impact on FXCM or its ability to service its customers.
FXCM’s only debt is its loan to Leucadia. Currently, $66.7 million remains outstanding on the Leucadia loan while FXCM has approximately $130 million in capital following the sale of FastMatch with $123.9 million in cash as of June 30, 2017. As recently announced, FXCM used $46.7 million of proceeds from the sale of its stake in FastMatch to pay down the Leucadia loan and expects additional paydowns in the coming months.
Full details can be found in the press release.
Jason
Is there any decent broker at US or U.S trader could trade?