FXCM has circulated a letter to ODL’s customers notifying them that their financial spread betting account will be migrated to FXCM’s own proprietory Trading Station II platform.

Letter announcement follows below -:

No Re–Quote Spread Betting with Trading Station II

Your ODL Spread Betting account is scheduled to be transitioned to the award-winning Trading Station II (TS2) trading platform on 4 June, 2010. To prepare, we suggest that you watch the video below to learn about the TS2 and practice placing some spread bets using a demo practice account.

Trading Station II offers No Dealing Desk execution on forex instruments and No Re-Quote spread betting on Stock Indices, Oil, and Precious Metals. You will need to download and install the TS2 software from our website. Upon transition to the TS2, we will email you a new username. You will fund your account and withdraw by logging into www.myfxcm.com with this new username. The website will be accessible via the TS2.

With the TS2, there will be a few changes to your trading experience.

SUMMARY OF CHANGES:

Download the Trading Station II software: You can quickly and easily download and install the software at this link: Click Here to Download.

Close your Bets: Due to quoting and sizing differences, we cannot directly carry over spread bets from one platform to another. Therefore, you must settle all open spread bets prior to your account’s transition. All Spread Betting accounts are scheduled to be transitioned during the weekend of June 4. We will be halting trading early on June 4, at 4:30 PM BST. Any positions open at that time will be automatically closed.

Different Spread Bet Sizes: Instead of a “stake-per-point” bet size, the FX Trading Station uses a lot system based on the underlying product. Your stake can vary according to what you are betting on. Profit and loss for FX markets will be denominated in units of the second currency in the FX pair. For example, for GBP v USD bets, profits and losses are in US Dollars. For AUD v JPY, profits and losses are in Japanese yen, and so on. In FX, going long one 10,000 unit lot (the smallest bet size) in EUR v USD is much like taking a 1 US dollar-per-point stake. Going long 1 lot of EUR/GBP would be like taking a 1 pound-per-point stake, and so on. For Commodity and Stock Index markets, profits and losses are denominated in the currency of the underlying market. So going long 1 contract in the UK 100 is like taking a 1 pound-per-point stake. Going long 1 contract of the US30 (or ‘Wall Street’) is like taking a 1-US dollar-per-point stake. All profits and losses are credited to or debited from your account in Sterling, so you do not need to do any conversions.

New Margin Requirements†: In many cases, you will have access to more generous margin after the update. For example, trading a 1 lot position (the smallest bet size), the margin requirement for EUR/USD is £50, GBP/USD is £50 and USD/JPY is £40. Additionally, 1 contract of the SPX500 is £75, the UK100 is £60 and USOil (WTI) is £125.

Margin Call Policy Changing: In contrast to you your current policy—where the largest losing trades are closed first-after the upgrade, if Usable Margin (“Usbl Margin” in the Accounts window) drops below zero, an order will trigger to close all open positions automatically. With this policy, your risk is always limited to the balance of your account, since you will never be required to pay a debit balance due to losses from trading.

Please Note: It is important to monitor your Usable Margin closely, making sure it does not fall below zero.

New Products: Explore Accounts will gain access to nearly forty new currency pairs and five new Stock Indices after the transition. Discover and Frontier accounts will gain access to over twenty new currency pairs and five Indices.

Emergent UK based foreign exchange and derivatives broker ODL Group Ltd announced this morning that it has agreed to be acquired by USA based rival FXCM. ODL Group, which also offers spread betting and CFD trading products is thought to be one of the UK’s largest retail foreign exchange brokers.

The deal will see ODL Group’s biggest shareholders, Graham Wellesley and Lorenzo Naldini selling the business in which they own more than 50% of the equity to USA-based forex exchange brokerage heavyweight FXCM Holdings to create a business with over 200,000 active trading accounts and some 1000 employees worldwide.

Mr Wellesley, ODL Group’s vice chairman whose line of ancestry is also connected to the Duke of Wellington, stated that the takeover was just the start of an ‘aggressive’ roll-out plan for the company in which he and Lorenzo Naldini will stay as partners with responsibility for managing the European divisions.

The new company is looking into becoming one of the top CFDs, forex and spread betting providers in the United Kingdom and a strong competitor to rival counterparts CMC Markets, IG Index and City Index. ‘We believe the takeover will enable us to build a globalised version of their business’, Mr Wellesley said.

Drew Niv, a co-founder of FXCM and the company’s CEO, stated: ‘For several years, FXCM has been working towards becoming a major provider in Europe. The deal with ODL will provide us with a great opportunity to achieve this.’

ODL Markets and FXCM both run on the Metatrader 4 trading platform and although there will be no immediate changes to ODL Markets’ spread betting platform, it is envisaged that ODL Markets will be looking to replace their current spread betting platform with FXCM’s Trading Station. As a commentator rightly pointed out FXCM has been in the process of expanding throughout Europe over the past couple of years opening offices in Paris, Milan, Athens, and most recently Berlin. With the acquisition of ODL, this expansion process will be accelerated.

No financial information regarding the structure of the deal has been disclosed by FXCM or ODL but FXCM is estimated to be worth about $1.5bn (£984m). ODL shareholders will get FXCM shares in exchange for their current equity but are still likely to constitute a sizeable minor portion in the newly-combined business.

The ban on shortly selling will only provide a temporary solution to the current problems to the markets, according to UK-based financial spreadbetting firm ODL Markets.

Duncan Anderson a senior manager at ODL, said: Whilst we have seen an initial bounce on the markets this morning, we are still unconvinced about the long-term future. The removal of short-selling has allowed investors to make more informed decisions on the valuations of banking stocks, with the removal for potential ‘market abuse’ adding a sense of realism to the market. This has clearly been taken positively, however the notion of short-selling is still a fundamental part of a working market.

Sandy Jadeja, Chief Market Strategist at ODL adds: ‘History has taught us that the market itself will continue in the major direction of a trend which in this case is a downtrend. This suggests that any rallies may only be corrective. On a technical level, the monthly charts have now been indicating a much larger degree trend is in place which will require much more than cash injections to save the faltering banking sector.’

Additionally, according to Jadeja, once the full effects have reverberated through the financial sector, there is nothing stopping speculators and investors seeking to short various other sectors, such as the retail, construction and automobile as well commodities and foreign exchange.

As one blogger put it so succinctly:

“People seek refuge in the stupidest ideas before they admit that they were wrong. Holders of bank shares, rather than face the fact that they are bad stock-pickers, want to blame short sellers. So of course, do banks’ bosses. After all, they’d do anything before admitting that they are just lousy at running their businesses.”

The real villains are the stupid greedy banks who thought they could make money from bundling up worthless debt into complex packages – the same people who flooded the market with easy money to people who could never really afford to pay them back … and now face negative equity higher mortgage repayments.

An extra-safe spread-betting account for beginners called ‘Discover’ has just been launched by ODL Securities. Traders get a guaranteed stop-loss order at no extra cost and can’t gear up positions, which hugely reduces the risks involved. The firm is also offering two other accounts aimed at more sophisticated spread bettors. The ‘Explore’ account is a more intermediate level product, allowing more risks. And management says it hopes to attract top-end punters with the personalised service offered on with its ‘Frontier’ account.

New research shows people in the UK are still keen to invest despite economic turmoil and some are even benefiting.

ODL Markets (ODL), the financial brokerage who is set to launch a new spread betting service this week, found that 33% of people will be actively looking to make more from their investment in 2008. Despite the accusations of the UK as a frivolous nation, almost 75% are regularly saving every month.

ODL also found that 33% would actively be looking for the most tax-efficient way of making the most of their spare cash, 37% invested a fixed amount, with a further 34% setting aside spare cash every month.

A quarter of respondents invested over 20% of their spare cash each month, almost 45% felt that buying property was a good short to medium term investment and a tenth of respondents were not aware that tax was payable on profits from selling an investment property, interest gained from money in a deposit account or from share dealings or dividends.

Over one in four people surveyed would take calculated risks and, given the hypothetical scenario of being given £10,000, over half said they would risk at least a quarter of the amount to try and double their money. However, with £500, only one in ten would invest any of it.

James Parker, head of spread betting at ODL markets, said: ‘Even though people are still keen to invest or speculate, generally they are not aware of the full range of financial tools at their disposal.’

He added: ‘Even in today’s economic climate, people are still happy to take financial risks if they think the rewards will be high enough.’

Broker ODL is to establish an FX spread-betting operation to target UK consumers early next year, the company said.

The broker is currently beta testing the new operation that will go live in the first quarter of 2007, said Alex McKinnon, head of FX. He said the platform will enable betting on 82 currency and precious metal pairs. The platform will also enable spread betting on commodities and major indexes such as Nasdaq and the FTSE 350. Customers will be able to trade on all different asset classes with a single login.

The company is setting up the operation with three hires it made from rival spread-betting firm City Index in the summer. Duncan Anderson and James Parker joined ODL in July, and Jason Gibson joined in September.

Anderson said the company would initially target existing ODL clients with a soft launch in February, with the platform opening to the wider public in March. He added that the platform would benefit from growing retail interest in FX trading. “Volumes have been up across the board and from a retail perspective they have really been pushing on.”