Forex Industry Week Review – Fortress Prime’s new CEO resigns, XTB completes IPO, FXCM slow to repay Leucadia, and lots more

Some of the most popular, shared and commented-on Forex industry news posts this past week on LeapRate included:

Nidal AbdelhadiNidal Abdelhadi resigns as CEO of Fortress PrimeLeapRate Exclusive… LeapRate has learned that Nidal Abdelhadi has decided to resign his position as Senior Executive Manager (essentially, the CEO) of Dubai-based Fortress Prime, just two months after making the jump to Fortress Prime from Swissquote. Mr. Abdelhadi is a well respected Forex industry executive, who was brought into Fortress to help deal with the many issues the company had with previous clients and – more importantly – to relaunch the Fortress Prime brand as a regulated provider of FX liquidity and institutional trading solutions. So what happened?

XTB successfully completes IPO on the Warsaw ExchangeXTB Online Trading IPO. It wasn’t exactly at the valuation they were hoping for nor the numbers being recklessly bandied about in several Forex blogs recently, but Forex broker and platform provider XTB did successfully float its shares and begin trading today on the Warsaw Exchange. XTB operates its own XTB Online Trading retail forex brand, and also markets the XTB Open Hub brand of liquidity solutions and the XOH Trader trading platform. So how much money did XTB raise? And at what valuation?

FXCM CEO Drew Niv

FXCM reports healthy Q1 financials, but weighed down by Leucadia interest expense. Retail forex broker FXCM Inc (NYSE:FXCM) has reported its Q1 financials, with relatively healthy Revenues of $71.5 million (up 9% QoQ) and EBITDA of $10.3 million. However the interest on the loan from Leucadia made last January, carrying fairly high punitive rates of interest in the high teens, is weighing heavily on FXCM’s bottom line results. Interest expense in the quarter amounted to $20.6 million – double FXCM’s EBITDA earnings.

Fortex launches turnkey xForce Prime of Prime solution for Forex brokers. ECN trading platform Fortex has announced the launch of its xForce Prime of Prime Suite for FX Brokerage companies. 
xForce is an end-to-end, prime-of-prime solution enabling banks and brokerages looking to become FX liquidity providers.

SaxoTraderGO one year on: 55% of Saxo Bank revenue, 100 white label partners. It has been exactly one year since LeapRate covered live the formal launch of Saxo Bank’s next gen trading platform SaxoTraderGO at a special Paris event. To mark SaxoTraderGO’s first anniversary, Saxo Bank has decided to share some of the stats the HTML5 platform has seen and achieved over the past 12 months.

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