1. All that Glitters Is Gold

The next time your partner complains that you have too much jewellery, point them in the direction of gold CFD valuations.

Having closed last year at just over $2,060, XAU sat at $3,340 as of today (Wednesday 28 May). In March, Fitch Ratings increased its 2025–2027 assumptions for gold, driven by the higher geopolitical premium due to the metal’s safe haven status. Trade war concerns and volatility in equity and bond markets have increased inflows into gold investments, leading to record prices.

There is a broad consensus among analysts that it is hard to know where gold will go next, having dropped to $3,285 today before breaching $3,300 again but still a way below the all-time high of $3,500 reached in mid-April.

There is certainly scope for the precious metal to move closer to that all-time high if geopolitical concerns around Israel and Iran increase—a move that would be supported from the perspective of the MACD or moving average convergence divergence—but that is not guaranteed.

For example, prices fell by more than 2% when the US and China announced that they would temporarily lower tariffs on each other’s products.

Current US interest rate expectations are for at least two hikes by the Fed over the remainder of 2025 with most observers expecting the first to happen in September. Higher rates tend to be negative for non-interest bearing gold.

A continuation of the slowdown in ETF buying that we have seen in the second quarter would also be a negative development and while central banks continue to purchase gold, the pace of these purchases has also slowed this year.

Investor holdings in gold ETFs generally rise when gold prices rise, and vice versa.

It could be that gold has already topped—although there are analysts who insist that gold should continue to act as a safe haven as markets fret about the high levels of US government debt. BNP Paribas has slightly cut its H2 2025 price expectations as the rush to trade deals reduces some (but not all) macro risk.

For those who fancy a punt, Pepperstone reduced the spreads on its gold CFDs by up to 30% earlier this month.

You may also like: “Reducing Spreads Will Impact Revenue, But It’s Strategic”

2. LMAX Takes a Punt on Digital Assets

In a recent interview, Barbara Pozdorovkina, growth officer at LMAX spoke about a tokenised future and the firm’s desire to build a cross-asset marketplace combining FX and crypto.

The upshot of this interview was that LMAX is expanding its digital asset infrastructure with a strong institutional focus via the introduction of a tokenised trading environment.

Given that tokenisation has moved beyond theory and is now market structure, it makes sense for exchange operators to position themselves as conduits for regulated digital assets rather than simply providers of trading infrastructure.

In March, LMAX Digital announced that it has added Ripple USD to its list of trading instruments. Managing director, Chris Knight, described the move as part of its strategy to provide institutional clients with access to the most liquid digital assets.

The pace of change then becomes a question of timing—do you adopt the “build it and they will come” approach or wait for regulation to catch up?

LMAX has referred to Coinbase’s inclusion in the S&P 500 as a milestone for crypto’s mainstream acceptance and reckons the plans outlined by SEC chair, Paul Atkins, for clearer crypto token regulations could potentially ease compliance burdens and foster institutional adoption.

Earlier this month, Atkins told a hearing discussing oversight of the SEC that regulating digital assets was a “key priority” and that recommendations should be forthcoming in the next few months.

Separately, a bill to create a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins advanced in the US Senate after previously failing to gather sufficient cross-party support.

LMAX will also have taken heart from the decision of Sharplink Gaming to proceed with a $425 million private investment, which will see the online performance marketing company adopt Ethereum as its primary treasury reverse asset.

With both BlackRock and Fidelity reportedly purchasing approximately $25 million of ETH and more than three-quarters of respondents to EY’s 2025 institutional investor digital assets survey expecting to increase their allocations to digital assets in 2025—with 59% planning to allocate over 5% of assets under management to digital assets or related products—LMAX’s optimism could be well-founded.

3. “Kraken” the European Crypto Market

Kraken's European customers can now trade regulated crypto derivatives, including both perpetual and fixed maturity contracts.

The firm has been keen to stress that it is offering access to existing rather than new contracts, which has implications for trading volumes as well as execution costs and the process of moving collateral.

The move is further evidence of Kraken’s determination to create an institutional grade trading platform where any asset can be traded, anytime.

Kraken is not the first cryptocurrency exchange to go down this road in Europe. Earlier this year, Bitstamp became the cryptocurrency exchange in Luxembourg to receive authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.

Also in May, Gemini confirmed that it had received an investment firm licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority, while Backpack Exchange acquired FTX EU, the former European platform of FTX.

The common theme across these moves is recognition that although institutional clients want access to deep liquidity pools, they are only willing to trade financial contracts within a regulated framework.

In a recent interview with The Block, Alexia Theodorou, Kraken’s head of derivatives said derivatives trading now accounts for as much as three quarters of total crypto trading volume and that it was growing much more rapidly than spot despite overall volumes being relatively similar.

However, she also acknowledged that it might take time for crypto derivatives to reach similar levels to the equities market, where they exceed spot trading volumes many times over.

With crypto derivatives trading expanding at a more rapid rate than spot, Kraken is banking on institutional clients being attracted by capital-efficient trading options.

Source: Finance Magnates