Certain regions within the Asia Pacific region are instrumental to the global FX industry, namely Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. Whilst these three nations have extremely advanced financial markets economies and technological infrastructure, the nature of the FX trading environment is very different for each, with Hong Kong and Singapore being the mainstay of Asia’s institutional and interbank market, and Japan’s primarily retail market making up 35% of the world’s retail FX order flow.
Large numbers of Western brokerages, liquidity providers and platform providers have entered Singapore and Hong Kong, whereas Japan has concentrated on ensuring its local client base remains loyal to Japanese FX giants. Despite the domestic nature of the Japanese market, many firms in Japan have offered Western platforms such as MetaTrader 4 and cTrader, however there is evidence of this dynamic changing somewhat, with Japan’s Forex Crown having entered into an agreement with Korean FX platform provider WinFX, developed by Seoul-based Winwaysystems.
This has come to fruition at a time when large Japanese brokers, including MONEX Group and Yahoo’s YJFX having ceased to offer MetaTrader 4 in Japan, and upstart Korean firms with liquidity neutral platform offerings that connect by FIX API to a broker and liquidity stream offering an aligned solution, there is clearly room for growth within the Asia Pacific region for a completely home-grown retail trading ecosystem.
With Forex Crown having made trading available to its existing and new client base yesterday, currently three currency pairs are available, namely USDJPY, EURJPY, EURUSD, and the system operates a flat-rate margin system which is common to each currency pair, at 13,000 yen per currency, with a minimum first deposit amount of 1 million yen.
To read the full announcement, click here.