Category: News

The index is based on Robinhood’s 20 million+ funded customer accounts.

It is to be updated monthly.

Robinhood, a major US commission-free stock trading and investing app, launched the Robinhood Investor Index on Friday to track the top 100 stocks its users are investing in.

The Index, which is based on data on the stock holdings or positions of the firm’s 20 million+ funded customer accounts, will be updated once a month.

“Over the last several years, we’ve seen our customers — and millions more like them — play an increasingly important role in the market. With the Robinhood Investor Index launch, we’re giving customers, and the world, a look at everyday investor positioning and performance on Robinhood,” Robinhood explained in a statement published on Friday.

Robinhood noted that, unlike many other indices, its new investor index is not “weighted by dollars but by conviction.”

“We measure a customer’s conviction for each investment by looking at the percentage it makes up of their portfolio,” the US trading app operator noted.

Additionally, Robinhood explained: “And to ensure that all customers are equally represented, we average conviction for each investment across all customers, whether they have $20 or $20 million in their account.

The tool will facilitate the digitization of the debt capital raise process.

Onbrane is a European fintech company.

Nasdaq recently announced that it has partnered with Onbrane, a Europe-based financial technology firm providing technology-driven solutions to the debt market, for the launch of Nasdaq Primary.

According to the details shared by the company in an official announcement, Nasdaq Primary is an important tool that facilitates the digitization of the process of raising debt capital by providing an all-in-one platform for market participants.

Headquartered in France, Onbrane provides a broad range of services to players in the debt market. The company has expanded its services substantially in the past few months to meet the growing demand.

“Onbrane´s purpose is to help build a better, more sustainable primary debt market. We couldn’t think of a better partner than Nasdaq to do so. In addition to sharing the same passion for technology, Nasdaq and Onbrane share the same commitment and focus on bringing innovative technology to the debt market. We are very excited to partner with Nasdaq to provide the global primary debt market with a market infrastructure that answers today’s growing demand for efficiency, security compliance and sustainability,” said Pascal Lauffer, Onbrane’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

Read our articles about best brokers with Nasdaq.

The network transition will reduce energy consumption significantly.

The deposit contract of ETH 2.0 now has more than 13.71 million staked Ethereum.

Ethereum Merge, the much-awaited event in the history of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, went live on 15 September 2022. In an official announcement on Thursday, Vitalik Buterin, the Co-Founder of Ethereum, confirmed the finalization of the merge and termed it as “a big moment” for the crypto ecosystem.

According to an estimate, the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake will reduce global energy consumption by almost 0.2%. “And, we finalized. Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today,” Buterin highlighted in a Tweet today.

Since the launch of the Beacon Chain in December 2020, the crypto community showed massive support for the network upgrade of Ethereum. According to Etherscan, a block explorer and analytics platform for ETH, more than 13.71 million coins have been staked under the deposit contract of ETH 2.0.

Following the completion of the merge, ETH spiked by over 3% and crossed the price level of $1,600. The cryptocurrency is currently trading near $1,650 with a market cap of more than $200 billion.

Read our article about best brokers for trading Ethereum.

Impact of Merge

Commenting on the potential impact of the latest development across the ETH network, Simon Peters, a Market Analyst at eToro, said: “Ethereum is arguably the largest ecosystem within crypto. Thousands of projects and decentralized applications (dapps) rely on the Ethereum blockchain to store data and manage their dapps. As the Ethereum ecosystem has grown, scaling solutions have been called upon to keep dapps fast and cheap to use in terms of the transaction or ‘gas’ costs. At its core, this is the main reason for transitioning from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).”

“Also essential is making the network more energy efficient. This has particular importance in the current global macroeconomic circumstances, in which energy prices are high and emission reductions are expedient. The Ethereum Foundation estimates energy usage will drop from around 112 terawatt-hours per year to just 0.1,” he added.

MT4/5 is the top choice trading platform among CFD brokers, even white labels. But, MetaQuotes’ new white label requirements are troubling new offshore brokers.

Since 2018, MetaQuotes has not been selling MT4 full servers because of its campaign for brokers to transit to its newer technologically-advanced MT5 trading platform. Hence, new brokers looking to offer forex and CFD services depend on white-label offerings from established brokers that have access to the MT4 servers to kick off their own brokerages, hence saving costs.

In addition, MetaQuotes offers white-label services to brokerages who use the software provider’s infrastructure to run their own forex and CFD brands. Opting for MetaQuotes’ white label service has been said to be much more expensive than patronising established brokers.

While this arrangement has been going on for years, prospective forex and CFD brokers are finding it hard to be onboarded by white-label services to kick off their new brands. This difficulty has been attributed to tougher requirements being requested by MetaQuotes from brokers before processing their white-label requests.

Let’s see what are the requirements now, including those recently added, for MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 White Labels:

• Certificate of Incorporation
• Register of Directors and Register of Shareholders
• Registered and Physical Address
• Corporate Account Verification

The toughest of these requirements is corporate account verification.

New brokers are also required to provide a recent Certificate of Good Standing or a Certificate of Incumbency (if the company is older than six months), and confirmation of domain ownership with registration details in the company’s full name.

They are also to provide a certified reference letter or statement issued by the bank. This statement, which verifies the existence of an active bank account, must contain the company’s registration number and registered address.

Furthermore, one of the latest onboarding requirements is for the key persons behind the brokerage to verify their identity on video recording with their passports or identity cards.

Corporate account verification is a big challenge because most brokers choose to start out in jurisdictions such as Seychelles, Vanuatu and St Vincent and the Grenadines where regulations are less stringent in order to save cost.

Compared to ‘onshore’ locations, offshore jurisdictions’ requirements from news brokers are easier to meet; hence, they attract many smaller-sized brokers who want to break into the retail trading industry.

The official website of MetaQuotes – metaquotes.net

MetaQuotes Background

Trading platform MetaTrader 4 (MT4) since its introduction in 2005 has grown to be a giant in the online foreign exchange industry. The software is now comfortably the number one choice for online retail forex traders.

MT4, which was primarily built for the forex market, was developed by MetaQuotes, a leading software development company that serves brokerages, banks, and exchanges.

In 2010, MetaQuotes introduced MetaTrader 5 (MT5), an upgraded version of the trading platform. The newer trading platform came with added features, such as support for trading in CFDs, stocks, options, and futures markets.

On June 7, 2021, MetaQuotes reported that MT5 became a more popular platform than MT4 for the first time in history. The developer reported at the time that the number of lines of MetaTrader 5 code “exceeded 7 million” when the previous version numbered “only 2 million”.

These statistics prove the decades-long patronage MetaQuotes has been enjoying from both on- and offshore entities in the retail forex and CFD industry.