NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC ("KSF") and KSF partner, Former Attorney General of Louisiana, Charles C. Foti, Jr., announce the commencement of the firm’s securities class action lawsuit against FXCM Inc. ("FXCM " or the "Company") (NYSE: FXCM). The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of purchasers of FXCM common stock pursuant to its December 2010 Initial Public Offering (“IPO” or “Offering”) of 15,060,000 shares of common stock (with an overallotment option of 2,259,000 shares), priced at $14.00 per share.
What You May Do
If you are an FXCM shareholder and would like to discuss your legal rights and how this case might affect you and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, e-mail or call KSF Managing Partner, Lewis Kahn (lewis.kahn@ksfcounsel.com), toll free, 877-515-1850, or via cell phone any time at 504-301-7900, or KSF Director of Client Relations, Neil Rothstein, Esq. (neil.rothstein@ksfcounsel.com), toll free at 877-694-9510, or via cell phone any time at 330-860-4092. If you wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in this class action by overseeing lead counsel with the goal of obtaining a fair and just resolution, you must request this position by application to the Court by May 2, 2011. Any member of the putative class may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. KSF encourages both institutional and individual purchasers of FXCM to contact the firm. The ultimate resolution of any securities class action is strengthened through the involvement of aggrieved shareholders and lead plaintiffs who have large financial interests. KSF also encourages anyone with information regarding FXCM’s conduct during the period in question to contact the firm, including whistleblowers, former employees, shareholders and others.
About the Lawsuit
FXCM, its Board of Directors at the time of the IPO, and the Underwriters involved in the Offering (including Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (“Credit Suisse”), Citigroup Global Markets Inc. (“Citi”) and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (“J.P. Morgan”), are each charged with including or allowing the inclusion of materially false and misleading statements in the Registration Statement and Prospectus (collectively, “Prospectus”) issued in connection with the IPO, in direct violation of the Securities Act of 1933.
Specifically, Defendants each failed to conduct an adequate due diligence investigation into the Company prior to the IPO, and they also each failed to reveal, at the time the IPO closed that the Company was not proceeding according to plan, that FXCM’s growth and trading volume had slowed or weakened by the time of the IPO, which would make it impossible for FXCM to achieve its projected results sponsored and/or endorsed by Defendants prior to and at the time of the IPO. Moreover, Defendants failed to disclose the true nature of its operations.
It was only on February 8, 2011 that the truth about FXCM began to be revealed. On that day, a complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York, alleging inter alia violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”). The complaint charged, among other things, that FXCM bilked thousands of customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars using deceptive and unfair trade practices; falsely portrayed its trading platform as a fair, transparent, and true foreign currency market environment free from dealer intervention or manipulation; FXCM interfered with customer trades and traded against its own customers; and that FXCM lured thousands of customers to its trading platform by promoting a “demo account.”
That complaint further detailed defects and programmed gaffes in the FXCM trading platform, including: slow server command, false error messages, flash trades, arbitrary margin rules, slippage, and slow fill or no fill commands, that were each designed to transfer wealth away from the Company’s customers and to FXCM in an illegal and improper manner. Thereafter, as investors soon learned, the effect of these defects and gaffes was that once FXCM customers understood and realized the inherent problems with the FXCM platform, they stopped using it. Accordingly, on February 16, 2011, as reported by Barrons.com, an analyst with Citi downgraded shares of FXCM and reported on the decline in trading customers, in part, as follows:
Shares of online foreign exchange broker FXCM (FXCM) are down more than 13% today after it reported lower trading volume in January from a year earlier.
The firm, which went public in December, generated an average of 307,689 retail client trades per day in January. That was down 7% from a year earlier but up 11% from the prior month. Its total retail-customer trading volume rose 5% on year to $258 billion, which was up 8% from December.
Analyst William Katz at Citi (C) lowered his rating on the stock from buy to hold. He wrote in a note that last month’s results were “substantially” below expectations. “And, with February off to a sluggish start, the data call into question our 2011-12 … growth assumptions and begin to suggest potentially greater maturity in the business than previously contemplated,” Katz added.
On this news, FXCM stock declined from a close of $13.70 per share on February 15, 2011, to close at $12.05 per share the following day on extremely heavy volume of 2.48 million shares traded. Moreover, as the market continued to digest the adverse news about FXCM, shares of the Company continued to trade lower, reaching a low of $11.22 per share on February 23, 2010 - within only four trading days of the February 15 downgrade.
About Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC
KSF, whose partners include the Former Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., is a law firm focused on securities class action and shareholder derivative litigation with offices in New York and Louisiana. KSF's lawyers have significant experience litigating complex securities class actions nationwide on behalf of both institutional and individual shareholders. Recent cases include In re Virgin Mobile USA IPO Litigation, 2:07-cv-05619-SDW-MCA (D. N.J.), Co-Lead Counsel, $19.5 Million Settlement; In re BigBand Networks, Inc Securities Litigation, 3:07-CV-05101-SBA (C.D. Cal.), Co-Lead Counsel, $11 million settlement; In re U.S. Auto Parts Networks, Inc. Securities Litigation, 2:07-cv-02030-GW-JC (C.D. Cal.),Lead Counsel, $10 million settlement. KSF is also federally court-appointed Co-Lead Counsel in THE shareholder derivative cases against BP, AIG and Bank of America (Merrill Lynch merger) emanating from their recent multi-billion dollar economic declines.
To learn more about KSF, you may visit www.ksfcounsel.com.