How it started
1999–2008: Founding and Refco stake
Forex Capital Markets was founded in 1999 in New York, and was one of the early developers of and electronic trading platform for trading on the foreign exchange market. Initially, the firm was called Shalish Capital Markets, but after one year, rebranded as FXCM. In 2003, FXCM expanded overseas when it opened an office in London which became regulated by the UK Financial Services Authority.
In January 2003, FXCM entered into a partnership with Refco group, one of the largest US futures brokers at the time. Refco took a 35% stake in FXCM and licensed the FXCM software for use by its own clients. Refco filed for bankruptcy on October 17, 2005, a week after a $430 million fraud was discovered, and two months after its initial public offering. Refco's CEO Phillip R. Bennett was later convicted of the fraud.
In November 2005, Refco agreed, in part, to sell its 35% stake back (which included 15,000 customer accounts) to FXCM for $110 million. In March 2006, however, Refco's creditors disallowed the deal and, later, denied a separate $130 million bid by FXCM. Refco's stake in FXCM was eventually sold to a consortium of buyers, including Lehman Brothers Holdings.
2009–2014: Legal issues and initial public offering
In May 2010, FXCM, Inc. purchased the UK-based, ODL Group. FXCM had previously acquired ODL's U.S. business in January 2009. The 2010 acquisition made FXCM the largest retail forex broker in the world with over 200,000 clients and assets of around $800 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on FXCM, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2