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FXCM Holdings LLC (FXCM) (http://www.fxcm.com) has been awarded Best Retail Platform by FX Week at the 2010 e-FX awards for the second year in a row.

The award, announced on July 13, 2010, at the FX Week U.S. conference, recognizes industry excellence in electronic foreign exchange trading from banks and vendors.

FXCM prevailed over other industry leading firms, including Oanda and Saxo Bank.

Drew Niv, CEO of FXCM, stated, “This award once again confirms FXCM’s leadership in the forex market. The No Dealing Desk (agency execution) business model embraced by FXCM in 2006 is clearly the direction forward for the retail industry. Clients want transparent and fair execution and FXCM offers it.”

FXCM developed its proprietary trading platforms: FX Trading Station II (PC-based) and FXCM Active Trader (Web-based) to meet the rigorous conditions of today’s volatile markets. The current platforms were developed by an in-house team of over fifty programmers. Strategy Trader, a third platform to be released soon, will be a direct competitor to the industry loved MetaTrader 4, but has been built specifically for FXCM’s No Dealing Desk business model.

FXCM offers a variety of platforms based on specific trader needs. Along with the platforms listed above, FXCM offers a mobile platform for iPhone, BlackBerry®, Android, and Windows operating systems. The Forex System Selector and MetaTrader 4 platforms† offers clients the ability to set strategies and walk away. All of FXCM’s platforms are extremely scalable and robust. There are over 200,000 live accounts trading on multiple platforms offered by FXCM, with an average of over seven million trades per month.

FXCM currently has successful white-label relationships all over the world working with banks, brokerages, and large financial institutions. White label partners are able to deploy individually customized platforms based on FXCM’s awarding forex trading platform.

Source: http://www.fxstreet.com/news/forex-news/article.aspx?storyid=ef88b629-3cb8-4302-970f-97a23df092e9

Global currency trading volume declined 6 percent to just under $100 trillion last year, after setting records in 2007 and 2008, as hedge funds placed fewer trades than in previous years, Greenwich Associates said.

Trading by fund managers fell 23 percent in 2009, leading the declines among the 1,497 corporate and institutional customers surveyed by Greenwich Associates in North America, Europe and Asia, according to the Stamford, Connecticut-based financial-market research company. The drop was partially offset by trading at retail platforms, which grew 16 percent, and by corporations, which rose 10 percent.

“Hedge funds have been a major driver of FX growth for the last several years and when their volume slows down, and it did a lot, the market as a whole feels it,” said Peter D’Amario, a Greenwich Associates consultant in Stamford. “You haven’t seen the opportunities that are generating a need to trade. Reduced volatility has reduced opportunity.”

Foreign-exchange trading volumes dropped as market stability returned in 2009, following the unprecedented volatility of 2008, as financial system turmoil spurred an increase in activity among companies and large financial institutions.

Foreign-exchange volatility, a measure of risk implied by option prices, reached a 19-month low in April, a JP Morgan Chase & Co. index showed, after trading the highest level since at least 1992 in 2008. Options traders expected on April 15 that currencies of the Group of Seven industrialized nations would fluctuate by an annualized 10.47 percent in three months, the lowest since September 2008. It reached as high as 26.55 percent on Oct. 24, 2008.

Source: Bloomberg by Ben Levisohn