You don't need any qualifications if your forex market maker business is not registered in US. There are costs involved with this as you may need to purchase a forex trading platform. The price of it varies, but it starts from about $10k downpayment plus the company that sells it to you may want a cut of your profits. On the other hand as a market maker you could take the other side of your clients transactions or give them up to a clearing house. Also you would have an incentive to place lots of trades. So you could still make money even though your clients are not. To be honest a see a huge conflict of interest here ... I'm not sure how much your clients would like that.
OK, you are confusing two things here : MM is somebody who "makes" the price for its customers: e.g. a bank, a retail platform etc. This is very different from managing someone's money ( and in the process "taking" the price from one or several MMs). If you want to manage funds you have two options it seems. One: clinets open account directly with a MM and give you the power of attorney to trade. No registration needed since the funds are held with a registered FCM (the MM in question). Two: you create a legal entity and hold the funds yourself - then you will need NFA/CFTC registration. Obviously the entity will then need to open an account with a MM to trade the funds. This is very approximative of course, but the logic is valid I believe
Does anyone have any practical experience (whether as a client or manager) or comments on Oanda's FXManager, about such as business model and platform operations? TIA