That was one of the best conferences I have ever attended.

The Venue was impressive, the lunch superb and the speakers were entertaining, knowledgeable and informative.

Bill Hubbard was a speaker, wearing trade mark braces and full of wisdom from bygone days. According to Bill the ECB rate would remain unchanged for the foreseeable future. He put forward numerous and well presented arguments to support his views. The fact that the ECB rate actually did drop within the next hour in no way detracted from the entertainment value

Zoe Fiddes gave a concise overview into the arcane world of automated trading systems. I am now au fait with EAs etc. However, as I do not want to be responsible for starting WWIII, I will probably leave them alone.

The best show of the day was the "High Noon" confrontation between proponents of dealing desk v no-dealing desk providers, GFT and FXCM, Muhammed Rasoul and Brendan Callan respectively.
Both speakers were Very American. Muhammed Rasoul gave a fascinating but completely incomprehensible insight into the mechanics of the GFT system. he followed this with a statistical analytic comparison between GFT and the other MMs and brokers, or agencies and other things which he preferred to call them. At the end of his performance I was utterly,(almost) in favour of GFT.
!5 minutes later, after Brendan's systematic annihilation of GFT's arguments, I was back to square one. It must be very confusing to be American.
It did warm my heart when both speakers agreed not to take questions from their staff planted in the audience. The first question to FXCM was a real kick in the nether regions from a well rehearsed member of the public who wanted to know why FXCM had been fined millions of follars in the USA. Brendan soon put our minds at rest as it happened a long, time ago, 2008/9 and could never happen again.
Muhhammed gave an equally convincing, succinct, response to awkward questions by saying that the answer was yes and no to all of them.

The live trading Guru had a hard act to follow, but he did put on a good show. He did lose money on his only live trade, but so what, I do that all the time.

Please do not be put off by any flippancy on my part, I really did enjoy the day.

PS. Bullie did a good job too!

Thanks Bob, sounds like fun. And a very humorous post by you :-) I like the idea of 2008-9 being such a long time ago.

Well it was a long time ago compared to September 2010 when they were last found to be 'at it'. And even longer ago than August 2011 when they were fined $2m for their shenanigans. Maybe they didn't mention that bit to their rep, or perhaps those dates don't count. :)

NFA Complaint - August 12th 2011

Suggest you Google MT4 Virtual Dealer Plugin by Boston Technologies if you really want to learn how those scrotums rip-off your average retail punter.

I see FXCM had 40,000 margin liquidation orders in the first 9 months of 2010. That's a hell of a lot of people overtrading!

Bob; Thanks for the after thought:-0)


Some other great comments by email from attendees and sponsors, so we will be repeating this in April 2012.

mike

If anyone wants to see the various presentations they are available at:

Forex Conference Speaker Presentations