Ever since Gain Capital acquired the retail clients base of CMS Forex the popular VT Trader platform wasn’t available to retail clients. Many clients wrote to me and probably to Gain Capital/CMS to complain about that. It has now been more than six months since the acquisition and despite Gain’s CEO Glenn Stevens announcement that Gain is going to offer VT Trader by itself it seems that they just couldn’t overcome all the integration technicalities themselves.

What’s going to happen now is that retail forex clients will be able to use VT Trader when they are introduced to Gain by CMS. This is not an ideal set-up of course but I guess when your option is all or nothing and you really like the platform you’ll go through this procedure.

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CMS Forex itself is an NFA member Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) and approved Forex Firm. Part of CMS’ business is to provide clearing services for institutional clients, referred to as eligible counterparties, or ECPs, globally. Another part of CMS’ business is to act, under their FCM status with the NFA, as an introducer of retail clients to Gain Capital – Forex.com – which is exactly what CMS is going to do here. For CMS it’s a sweet deal as they have a distinct technological advantage over any other IB because many clients demand this platform and only they provide it. If CMS would have been an IB in the first place and offered this platform I’d speculate that they will soon become a standalone broker – but it seems this is a unique situation where everything happened in exactly the opposite order.

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