…. but the US Retail FX market continues to be a shrinking one for most of the other NFA regulated brokers.
The CFTC released its monthly figures for January on the US Retail FX sector, and while overall US client assets in the retail FX space increased by 3% over December, virtually the entire increase was due to healthy rises in client assets at industry leaders FXCM and Interactive Brokers (see chart below). Virtually every other NFA regulated firm continued to see a flight of assets.
US regulators have come down hard on the retail FX space. After reducing leverage to 50:1 in 2011, the CFTC recently announced its plans to ban credit card deposits to retail Forex and futures accounts. We’ve seen the recent pullout from the US market by firms such as FX Club, Deutsche Bank’s dbFX, GFT, and City Index’s FX Solutions, and we expect more attrition from brokers sitting lower on the list (size-wise) below. However, to be fair, the exodus has not been one sided, we’ve also seen some firms still believe in the future of the US market and begin operations there, most recently Australia’s leading FX firm AxiTrader.
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.