Yeah to my knowledge they are the same company for all intents and purposes although they pretend not to be... Same platform and all that good stuff.
I contacted them back in Jan 08 and the replies I got when I asked them candidly about their connection with FXCM were evasive to say the least.... Subject: Deutsche Bank FX From: dbFX Sales and Support <sales@dbfx.com> Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:39:07 +0000 (GMT) I truly do appreciate your candid remarks here. I suspected this was the reason you and your clients chose not to move forward given our previous discussions. This issue has come up repeatedly during the course of the dbFX project and I agree with you that what is needed above all is more transparency across the board. However as you can imagine there are competing concerns within any large organization and in this case we're prevented from disclosing certain information. I can tell you that we use certain third-party technology including FXCM's API technology for automated trading. However beyond that we're not able to disclose anything further. Many clients ask about platform and API similarities with FXCM, and all we're able to do is point out that while technology may be shared or licensed, all dbFX clients are direct clients of the bank, hold funds with the bank, and trade directly with the bank. In any case best of luck in your own business and do keep my details in case of any future interest.
mbtrading it's at the moment the best option. I don't like many things of mbt like commission, rollover, platform. but I didn't find anything better. I test hotspot demo, and spread it's no so good. I phone them to uk and us, and they told me that the spread was correct, and live platform might be wider than demo,. Depend on the market participant. I trade at the moment with minis and hotspot have a minimum $6 so if I'm trading 30k they charge me the same as 80k. If I'm trading above 30k, its better hotspot than mbt, but the spread is wider so... A perfect option will be a currenex platform with a ecn broker, but this is out of my league, most of them required a 50k funding +100k contract.
minimum size on retail is 1000. but read info above about fxcm. It seems they are just buying the assets - don't know if they intend to use the the hotspot platform or one of their own. On institutional level, min is 500k w/100k balance to open.