FXCM records second best month ever of retail volumes at $450B after Franc set-back

FXCM Inc (NYSE:FXCM) today announced certain key operating metrics for January 2015 for its retail and institutional FX business. It’s main competitor within the ‘states Gain Capital, yesterday reported their operating metrics for January, with their retail volumes increasing 18% MoM to  $279.6 billion. Meanwhile, today we learned that FXCM reported a 3% MoM gain for it’s second best performance on record for retail clients at $450 billion. You can see in the chart below for FXCM that as retail volumes are trending up the last few months, it’s institutional business has been slowing down…

Per part of the deal of it’s financing lifeline in the wake of the CHF spike, FXCM has agreed to focus on it’s core business of retail traders and will sell ‘non-core’ assets such as it’s institutional business, FXCM Pro, which we reported on last week. So we may see a further consolidation of volumes to FXCM’s retail side as it divests more from the institutional business for now. Moreover, we may see a change to how FXCM defines it’s institutional segment, but no official word on this yet.

January 2015 Retail Trading Metrics

  • Retail customer trading volume of $450 billion in January 2015, 3% higher than December 2014 and 32% higher than January 2014.
  • Average retail customer trading volume per day of $21.4 billion in January 2015, 2% higher than December 2014 and 38% higher than January 2014.
  • An average of 662,080 retail client trades per day in January 2015, 11% higher than December 2014 and 61% higher than January 2014.
  • Tradeable accounts of 223,079 as of January 31, 2015, a decrease of 7,500, or 3% from December 31, 2014, and an increase of 33,469 or 18%, from January, 2014.

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January 2015 Institutional Trading Metrics

  • Institutional customer trading volume of $255 billion in January 2015, 21% lower than December 2014 and 39% higher than January 2014.
  • Average institutional trading volume per day of $12.1 billion in January 2015, 21% lower than December 2014 and 44% higher than January 2014.
  • An average of 35,734 institutional client trades per day in January 2015, 19% lower than December 2014 and 6% lower than January 2014.

“While it was a challenging month for FXCM due to the unprecedented movement of the Swiss Franc on January 15th and the resulting negative balances of a number of our clients, we were able to generate our second best month ever on the retail side and FXCM is back in a solid competitive position with approximately $1 billion in client equity and over 223,000 accounts worldwide,” said Drew Niv, President and CEO of FXCM. “For the first week of February, we are now receiving net inflows of client funds.”

“Our institutional business was affected somewhat in the month by the events of the 15th as a number of our institutional customers’ prime brokers initially disconnected from FXCM. However, I am pleased to say that all but one of the numerous prime brokers used by our institutional clients are back with FXCM and we remain optimistic that this business is on course to return to the growth it was experiencing before the events of the 15th.”

More information, including historical results for each of the above metrics, can be found on the investor relations page of the company’s corporate web site, by clicking here.

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