Hello everybody, despite having looked for quite some time to find a broker that offers USD/VEF or USD/QAR, I haven't found one. Does anyone of you know whether there is such a broker? If not, what else could one do to trade these currencies?
Both those currencies have an officially pegged exchange rate. With the VEF the actual exchange rate varies considerably from that, and the QAR to a lesser extent. Because of that situation you won't find a broker who's going to list that for punter's to trade, and if they did they'd have to either have a massive spread, they'd be able to manipulate the crap out of it, or both. The loophole you want to look for with any country with currency control is a way to conduct transactions at the official rate in one direction where the government forces it, and at the unofficial rate in the other. For example, for a while you could buy airline tickets at the official rate in VEF and actually pay a fraction of the list price, but they shut that down.
I see. Is this true for basically all pegged currencies? Apart from two exceptions (EUR/DKK and USD/SAR), I know of no such pair that is actually tradable.
I've run a couple companies that operate OTC markets, although not for FOREX. Based on my experience I just don't see a way for an honest operator to make a good risk adjusted return on any pegged currency. The more stable ones are an issue because the only time they move it's unexpected and violent and half your customers are going to lose more than they have on deposit and you'll only recover a fraction of that debt, but you're on the hook to fully pay all those on the winning side of the trade. So there may be companies out there that offer it, but I'm not sure you would want to work with them. Just my opinion though.
I was thinking of that being a problem. What finally led me to pose this question here was this: https://www.investing.com/currencies/usd-vef If you scroll down, just below the chart, there is a price for both the bid and ask. So I thought there might be a broker or more that offers this pair (and others). Even if there is no broker around offering it, someone is seemingly trading it. If not, I don't understand what this bid and ask price is all about.
Certainly there are people trading it OTC in order to do business in Venezuela I'm sure a couple big banks are still working import/export transactions. I just don't think it's available at a retail bucket shop and any trading that is done is probably pretty high touch brokered deals which require a pretty substantial volume for each transaction to be worth it.