FXCM, founded in 1999 in New York, is one of the early developers of online forex trading and presently one of the largest forex brokers in the world. The company released a detailed report on certain key operating metrics for December 2014 for its retail and institutional foreign exchange business.
The company ended the year on a strong note with a 5% increase in volume for December compared to the November figures posting a total customer trading volume of $439 billion for December. It was obviously a good year for the firm as it set new records in volume posting a Quarterly Retail Volume of $1.4 trillion and Quarterly Institutional Volume of $1.1 trillion, both representing new record volumes for the company. They also adjusted certain Q4 2014 guidance.
Over the course of the last four months, FXCM launched a new pricing model in selected geographic markets, offering unmarked up prices from its liquidity providers with a commission displayed separately. When compared to the markups offered on a number of the top currency pairs in these geographic markets, the new pricing could reduce client trading costs by as much as 60%.
Drew Niv, President and CEO of FXCM said
"The new pricing FXCM introduced in the fourth quarter has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback. "While we are still early into our launch, we are already seeing strong results - with those geographic markets that introduced the new pricing growing 76% in FX volume in the fourth quarter 2014 versus the prior quarter. That is almost double the 40% growth we saw in retail volume for FXCM as a whole."
"We believe this new initiative was a major reason why we reported record volume in the fourth quarter in our retail business," continued Niv. "More importantly, we believe it does not yet reflect the growth in our base of more active, high quality traders which we think will be attracted to the transparency our new plan brings and the tight pricing it offers. This could prove to be a major growth driver for FXCM in the coming quarters."
FXCM's retail business (US Dollars billions) quarterly performance can be summarized below:
| Q3 2014 | Q4 2014 | Q4/Q3 % Change |
|
| FXCM FX Retail Volume - Markets which Introduced New Pricing |
$303 | $535 | 76% |
| FXCM Retail Volume - Consolidated |
$977 | $1,366 | 40% |
The updated guidance is as follows:
Updated Guidance:
|
