CFTC Releases FCM Data for May 2009

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently released its latest report on financial data for Futures Commission Merchants. This contains the numbers as of May 31st 2009, "from reports filed by June 30th 2009". This report is particularly interesting because on May 16th the NFA's minimum net capital requirement for Forex Dealer Members increased from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000. The CFTC helpfully allow you to download monthly data going back to 2002 too. It's interesting to discover which brokers have fallen by the wayside over recent months as successive increases in regulatory capital requirements have weeded out the weaker players.

Going back to the latest data, top of the list is Goldman Sachs with an adjusted net capital of $14,305,722,863. As you know, here at the Trading Gurus we are primarily interested in brokers that allow the likes of you and I to use automated systems to do our forex trading for us. Unfortunately as far as I am aware Goldman Sachs don't fall into that category. Top of that somewhat shorter list are Interactive Brokers with $691,880,346, followed by Oanda with $159,062,073. Note that those two brokers offer a proprietary API and not MetaTrader 4. Maybe that is no coincidence?

Top of the list of brokers that do offer MetaTrader, through their UK operation at least, is Gain Capital Group (better known as Forex.com), followed by Forex Capital Markets (FXCM for short) with $63,999,806.

We leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to discover which retail forex brokers have just managed to clear the most recent hurdle put in their path by the regulators. Rest assured there are others on the way, not least of which is the new first-in first-out regulation, which comes into force after the close of trading on July 31st.