Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Turkey’s Ekspres Yatirim Menkul AS, owner of forex brand EkspresForex, has obtained a forex market maker license from the Capital Markets Board (CMB) of Turkey. The broker increased in end-April 2016 its capital to TRY 30 million, which is the minimum requirement for market maker licensees.
The news comes after in December 2015 the broker was fully acquired by local NET Holding. The buyer is best known as the operator of Merig Hotels and Casinos, located in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC).
Ekspres Yatirim Menkul, set up in 2003 as a broker of stocks of companies listed on the Borsa Instabul (BIST). It was until recently a unit of DenizBank, on of the leading banks in Turkey, which in 2013 terminated the license of Ekspres Yatirim Menkul and started offering forex trading services as a market maker under the brand DenizFX.
EkspresForex offers trading in forex, contracts for difference (CFDs), precious metals, commodities, and stock indices. It supports MetaTrader 4 (MT4), the world’s most widely-used forex trading platform, but does not offer its web-based version, according to data provided by forex portal Forex Brokerleri. An interesting fact is that the broker uses WhatsAPP chats for providing support to customers, instead of the industry standard LiveChat.
Recently, KapitalFX, another Turkish forex broker, received a market maker license from the CMB. KapitalFX is a brand of Reel Kapital Menkul Degerler AS, which just got renamed from Ekinciler Yatirim Menkul. The broker is expected to start activities within the next few weeks.
Since August 2011, after the CMB introduced regulatory amendments, forex brokers are required to have a Turkish license if they want to operate in the country. In February this year, the CMB introduced jet another new law which requires forex broker to conform to new maximum leverage requirements. The highest leverage allowed for trading accounts with a balance of less than TRY 20,000 is 50:1 for trading of gold and popular currency pairs, and the maximum leverage for other pairs is 25:1. Meanwhile, leverage for popular pairs traded via accounts with more than TRY 20,000 has been set at a maximum 100:1, while for other currency pairs the cap is 50:1.
