Prop trading firm FundedNext has launched the website for its new brokerage arm called FNmarkets.
The company offers Standard Accounts, RAW Accounts, and Islamics Accounts, with two different deposit bonuses also currently on offer across those accounts.
The broker is operating with two different entities. One is a license from the Comoros. As TradeInformer has reported on before, this license is not real and is typically just a way for companies to get access to MetaTrader products.
The other entity is in St Lucia, which has become a popular place for brokers to set up since St Vincent and the Grenadines announced more regulatory restrictions on brokers a couple of years ago.
The decision to launch a brokerage arm has been in the works for a while now. FundedNext announced that it had hired Fotis Theodosiou in February of this year.
Theodosiou was previously the Chief Dealer at broker Exclusive Capital. He also spent over six years working on the Cypriot dealing desk for the Exinity group of companies.
Why is FundedNext launching FNmarkets broker?
FundedNext is not the only prop firm to have branched out into the brokerage space. Other firms, like FTMO and Alpha Capital, have also set up brokerage entities.
FTMO did this by acquiring OANDA, but most other props have either acquired licences or just set up somewhere like St Lucia, where there is no regulatory regime covering CFDs.
In some cases, this may have been motivated by a genuine desire to launch a brokerage business. For example, it does like seem this is something FTMO is committed to doing.
However, in other cases it seems more out of a desire to get access to the MetaTrader 5 platform. TradeInformer understands that MetaQuotes’ policy is that firms must have a brokerage entity in order to access their platform.
As most props were not doing this, they couldn’t use the company’s platform. Setting up in somewhere like St Lucia is a cheap way of doing this and let’s you get access to the trading platform.
In the case of FundedNext, the decision to hire a dealing executive and launch a separate website suggests the firm may be more serious about actually running a brokerage business, alongside its popular prop trading offering.
