The U.S. arm of Alpari announced that it has been selected by Eugene Futures, one of Korea’s five largest retail FX firms, to provide liquidity to its spot FX business.
As we wrote back in March, we expect to see more consolidation and general fallout in the Korean Forex market, following the decision earlier this year by Korea’s financial regulators the Financial Services Commission (“FSC”) and the Financial Supervisory Service (“FSS”) to essentially declare war on the margin FX business by limiting leverage on new trades to 10x (versus 25x max leverage in Japan, 50x in the US, and 100x + in Europe). There is also maintenance leverage of 33x (3% margin) on existing positions in Korea.
The Eugene-Alpari hookup probably represents an attempt by Eugene to cut costs in the new regulatory reality it is facing in Korea.
For more on the global FX market see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.