Hello! I am looking for an ECN broker who offers the ability to trade all currencies physically available or at least most of them (both fixed and free-floating) rather than a small number of pairs. For example Turkish lira, Romanian lei, Venezuelan bolivar fuerte and etc. I would be extremely grateful if anyone could help me with this. Best regards
You're not going to find an "ECN" that's efficient for the pairs you want... Maybe look to a market maker instead.. since that's going to be your best avenue to get the really exotic stuff... a few good ones: CitiFX has 130+ pairs, many exotics Oanda has many exotics as well, and a lot of exotic crosses. neither are "ECNs"
Why? What is so bad in what I said? These currencies exist so there must be a way to trade them. They must somehow exchange money. Isnât there any option in the world to trade them?
you are correct, they can be exchanged, but that doesn't neccessarily mean traded. All the money is made in the spread by the market maker. Whereas,the major spreads can be very tight and the dealer makes it up on volume.
I agree they are not good for short term trading purposes but my interest is completely different. I am interested in the long term movement of the currency pair rather than a few days, weeks or even months or large sudden moves (like devaluing/ appreciating fixed rate currencies). For an example in 2011 Belarus devaluated its currency (by initially free-floating it). Now if in April or early May I believed that the currency would go down I could borrow it and convert it to some other currency. Ultimately the currency went down by 56%. But there is no broker that offered BYR/USD currency pair for an example. Or if in 2008 I believed that the Turkish Lira would go down in value I could have been short on that but I canât find and pair with the TRY. And there are many more similar examples. I am not even interested in leverage. Is there really no way to exchange these currencies? Any help would be appreciated.
What people picked out of your post as a problem (including myself) was the request for an ECN style broker to do this. The point was, even if you get a broker to do this, an ECN model wouldn't be of any benefit, and most likely will just make liquidity a problem since the currency pairs wouldn't be very active. In my earlier post, I pointed you toward two brokers that might have what you want, but are not ECNs.. they'll provide the liquidity, and take on the risk of finding liquidity in the real markets when they hedge their exposure.