If you sign up with Hotspot directly, USD 100K - at least thats what they told me last year. If you go though a (prime) broker, account minimums and commissions vary quite a bit, up and down. Take your pick: http://www.hotspotfx.com/clientBanks/pfis.jsp Hotspot discourages dealing amounts smaller than 500K units because some counterparties won't fill orders smaller than that. Question is if it makes much sense to trade accounts much smaller than 100k on Hotspot given the minimum ticket-size and typically high(compared to retail) margin requirements.
FXCM seems to be the 8 million pound gorilla in the FX world I'm becoming less and less worried about them going bust and losing my capital deposit.....
What exactly do your worries about FXCM have to do with the subject of this thread? Or do you just happen to type every random hunch you got into the keyboard?
Fxcm did not exactly 'buy' the retail branch - what actually happened was that every Hotspot retail client got an email saying that they are closing down and that, if the client choose to do so, they can move the account over to fxcm after the client signs the papers. Alternatively, if you don't sign up with fxcm, they will just send the money back. So essentially all that happend is that they sent out a bunch of emails to their former clients pimping for fxcm. Clients that qualified got an additional email offering to continue to trade with Hotspot on the institutional branch. As a former hotspot client i happen to know. All that has nada to do with the ops question, by the way..
I never said it did - nor does every comment have to be directly related to the original post...you'd be the best trader in the world if you were able to find all messages directly related to the original posting - and you are obviously not...(no offense) Thanks for the extra detail on the FXCM tidbit...