FX week in review: Investing.com sold, Plus500 acquires, SpotOption owners sued
This week the online trading world saw a number of interesting M&A deals, a large financing, a number of lawsuits, and of course some interesting executive moves including the departure of one of the longest serving CEOs in the Retail FX sector.
How much was popular forex trader website Investing.com sold for?
What was Plus500’s first acquisition in the US market?
Which “European Robinhood” neo-broker raised $80 million?
Answers to these questions and lots more appeared first or exclusively this week at FNG. Some of the top FX industry news stories to appear this week on FNG included:
FX affiliate site Investing.com acquired for $500 million. Israeli business news site Globes is reporting that FX broker affiliate site Investing.com is being acquired for $500 million by “an international investment fund based in East Asia”. Investing.com was first established as ForexPros.com in 2007. The company paid $2.5 million to acquire the investing.com url in 2012, and rebranded as such that year. Company founder Dror Efrat, who still owns a majority stake in the company along with three other co-founders, acted as CEO until handing the reins over to current CEO Omer Shvili in 2019. Mr. Shvili founded Retail FX broker Markets.com, selling the business to Playtech in 2015 for $250 million.
Plus500 enters US futures market via acquisition of Cunningham Commodities. CFDs broker Plus500 Ltd (LON:PLUS) today announces that it has conditionally agreed to acquire all of the membership interests of Cunningham Commodities LLC, a regulated Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), and Cunningham Trading Systems LLC (CTS), a technology trading platform provider, operating in the futures and options on futures market in the United States. Plus500 explains that the deal allows it to instantly expand its geographic footprint and product offering in the significantly growing, but under-penetrated, US retail trading market in futures and options on futures. The acquisition consideration of approximately US$30m will be funded from Plus500’s existing cash balances and paid on completion.
SEC goes after binary options scheme Spot Option, Pini Peter and Ran Amiran. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is targeting Spot Option and its owners Malhaz Pinhas Patarkazishvili (Pini Peter) and Ran Amiran in an action launched on April 16, 2021, at the Nevada District Court. The case concerns a multi-million dollar fraudulent scheme involving unregistered offers and sales of security-based “binary options” to retail investors in the United States from at least April 2012 through August 2017. The scheme was overseen by Pini Peter and Ran Amiran through a company they owned and controlled called Spot Option, Ltd. (“Spot Option”) now known as Spot Option Tech House, Ltd.
BUX raises $80 million, names new CEO. Amsterdam based BUX, one of the fastest growing neo-brokers in Europe, has announced that it has raised $80 million from both new and existing investors, backing its mission to become the leading neo-broker in Europe. The funding round was led by Prosus Ventures and Tencent, with participation from additional new investors ABN Amro Ventures, Citius, Optiver, and Endeit Capital. Existing investors HV Capital and Velocity Capital Fintech Ventures also participated in the round. Royal Park Partners acted as exclusive financial advisor to BUX and its shareholders throughout the transaction. One of the main advantages firms such as BUX have seen is that the US firms which have raised an absolute ton of cash and have grown even larger, such as Robinhood and Public.com, have remained rooted in the US market.
Among the top FX industry executive moves reported at FNG this week were:
❑ JFD Group sees departure of CEO Lars Gottwik.
❑ Eduard Poltavsky joins IS Prime from Refinitiv as Sales Director.
❑ Exness hires Anton Gnetov from Libertex for External Comms.
❑ Christine Brown tapped to lead Robinhood Crypto.
❑ RELX shareholders approve June Felix election as director.