No firm outside of the USA, without NFA/CFTC license, can take U.S. residents as (retail)clients. Or more like they could, but they would run into trouble with uncle sam. The american authorities make it a point to enforce their regulation in an extra-territoral fashion. The CTFC apparently has enough international sway to get firms even on remote islands like Mauritius to settle with them for taking in u.s. citizens as clients. As far as i know, you need to be an ECP.
I remember hearing good things about Solid-fx, have not used it personally. Currenex always had "last look". HotSpotFXi had anonymity going for it. Anyone use Integral? FXAll? many choices..... gotta be a baller to play with these toys... for hedge funds.
nice... they don't interest me now. I'd rather be messing with exotic options. You can mess with all those cool toys if you have 20k as retail in spot fx. I'd rather be at IB personally, with more instruments, options, etc etc.
Would you mind sharing your experience with FxAll, even though it is/was on the institutional side? I strongly consider using them through giveu-ps with my main broker. They seem to be well supported by the larger players and liquidity is pretty decent, obviously miles away from Reuters/EBS but still solid, but that is just my impression. I wonder specifically what your experience has been in terms of spread widening when you trade larger size.
I like to know at what order levels they start to widen spreads and by how much. On EBS/Reuters one generally pays an additional 1-2.5 pips for the more liquid pairs starting from around 30 million USD order equivalent. There are no rigid tiers but the numbers above are more observations over time. Any idea what that looks like for FXALL?
I would have to do a study of it, but you do realize that the answer I give you from that study may be vastly different than what you would see. Our feed from FXALL may be vastly different than what FXALL gives you. It all depends on your deal with them.
I am not fully aware of how they break down their client tiers. But partly because of that I am curious what others are seeing, even though it may not apply to my specific case. I trade up to 50 million but never in one clip. What I like to understand is what type of spread widening you are seeing and at what levels. No need to state your trading volume if that is proprietary, I guess I am just curious at what order sizes you see spreads to go out at first...