What percentage of global currency trading do US citizens account for? What percentage of global currency trading is off exchange? What percentage of off exchange trading do US citizens account for? This would be helpful in addressing the CFTC de-leveraging proposal
http://www.bis.org/publ/rpfxf07t.pdf?noframes=1 you can find the statistics at Bank of International Settlement, the sort of central bank for forex. the link is a triennial report for 2007 so we don't have nearest statistics until after 2010. i think it says USA contributes 16.6% of turnover but not possible to tell who are citizens and who are non-residents trading through US brokers.
Thanks for that link! I've been looking for something just like this, official. Awesome! Note: If the currency market turn-over was $3.2 Trillion in 2007, while growing at a rate better than 60% from the same triune back in 2004, then the next report (which should have been due in 2010), might/could show the currency turn over rate to be more than $5.12 Trillion. Amazing stuff. No wonder everybody is trying to put up a Prop Shop, Bucket Shop, Stop Hunting Shop, X-Shop, you name it Shop, connected to the Forex. Seems to be a money maker for a lot of people that know how the system works. De-leveraging the U.S. alone, given the statistics in this report, does what exactly CFTC? Who does it protect? How does it protect them? Heck, if the currency markets stay on this trajectory for growth, we are looking at $13.81 Trillion daily market turn-over in by 2016. I would say, fairly confidently, that the current Forex business/industry, has not even gotten off the ground yet, folks. We are still on the runway getting up to V1 airspeed. To de-leverage now, would be a mistake - a crying shame of epic proportions. Why not have the CFTC spend its time and energy, educating people about how and why the currency markets work the way they do. What a concept. A bureaucracy actually doing something worthwhile. Learn to trade AND trade to learn. The synergy will help you learn how to handle leverage properly. The People should have the option of selecting from a wide range of leverage settings. In fact, leverage should be selectable to two decimal places, or at least one decimal place and between a range 0 to 250. So, if I want my leverage this week set at 131.5:1, then I should be able to select that. In fact, why not simply make the leverage selection part of the trade entry process. Maybe I want 100 Lots in at 250:1, 500 Lots in at 137:1, 2,300 Lots in at 53.6:1 and 1 Yard in at 3:1 - all in the same trade profile. There are a lot of things that can be done to improve and optimize the business for traders and it will be the better Banks and better Intermediaries that make these improvements a reality in the future.
why should CFTC do all this (altruistically?) if they don't benefit from the exchange fees? as the other threads alluded to, the purpose is to drive US volume to the regulated "/6x" futures contracts.