Forex Industry Week Review  Who stole your MT4 clients, ACFX remains suspended, FXSpotStream starts disclosing volumes, and lots more

Forex industry news at LeapRate this past week was headlined by results disclosures from a number of FCA regulated brokers.

One thing our readers should note when looking at disclosed results of UK companies – some are real, some are not. What do we mean? Well some of the companies report their 'real' results, as the UK company is indeed the parent company (e.g. ActivTrades). For those companies it is possible to determine their real revenues and profits. But for others which simply act as the FCA regulated subsidiary of a larger company (such as OANDA and HY Markets), the companies often make intercompany transfers (such as hedging transactions) to transfer the risk of trades to other jurisdictions, and to manage profits toward low tax locations.

Our most popular guest posts of the week are courtesy of Timur Latypoff at MT4 technologies provider Takeprofit Technology on Who stole your MT4 clients?, and Bart Burggraaf at MediaGroup Worldwide on Is Social Media still the wrong channel to do advertising?

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

FXSpotStream starts reporting volumes. Multibank FX aggregation service FXSpotStream might have surprised some folks today when they – for the first time – announced the FX trading volumes supported on their system, as well as the size of those volumes. What were FXSpotStream's latest volumes? What was their best-ever month? And how do they stack up versus institutional eFX industry leaders ICAP EBS and Thomson Reuters, as well as mid-size venues such as FastMatch and BATS Hotspot?

steal client data Who stole your MT4 clients? Finding paying clients is what usually makes or breaks a retail Forex brokerage company. So many FX companies consist mostly of a marketing/sales department, because acquiring and retaining customers is the most important (and, probably, the most difficult) thing a broker can do to be profitable. In a special LeapRate guest post, Timur Latypoff, Dire ctor of MT4 technologies provider Takeprofit Technology takes a look at how MT4 based retail brokerages can protect themselves from theft of their clients' contact details.

ActivTrades reports 2015 Revenues up 27%. FCA regulated MT4 broker has grown to become a fairly formidable player in the UK online trading market, with Revenues growing 27% in 2015. ActivTrades also seems to have made it through the Swiss Franc spike early last year relatively unscathed, writing off just £1.1 million in negative client balances. So what were ActivTrades' Revenues in 2015? How much profit did they make? How much in new client money did they bring in last year? How many employees does ActivTrades have, and where are they based? (Hint: most aren't in the UK).

FXStreet's new website goes live (again). After a stutter start last month which saw their newly redesigned website go from beta to live and then taken back down again following a series of glitches and crashes, popular FX trader website FXStreet has taken the plunge again and relaunched their new website at fxstreet.com. So what does the new site look like?

social media advertising Is Social Media still the wrong channel to do advertising? The idea being that people are in content mode on social media, and not in buying mode like on Google search for certain queries. Bart Burggraaf, Managing Partner at MediaGroup Worldwide takes an interesting look at the pros and cons of social media marketing channels for Forex brokers.