Earlier this month, the CFTC released their monthly report titled Selected FCM Financial Data for the month ending February 29. 2020. The data were gathered in March, and published during the first week of April.
For those who don’t know, FCM stands for Futures Commission Merchant, a category which comprises all of the commodity futures brokers and forex brokers regulated in the U.S. by the CFTC — a group totaling 63 brokers, at present.
Of those 63 FCM’s, only 5 are U.S. retail forex brokers — the group we want to focus on.
The CFTC report is issued as a spread-sheet that will make your eyes bleed. Here is a LINK to this month’s CFTC report.
In recent years, the news organization Finance Magnates has done a marvelous job of extracting the forex-specific data from the CFTC’s monthly report, and boiling it down to a simple table showing the status of the 5 U.S. retail forex brokers, in terms of (1) net capital, (2) customer funds on deposit, and
(3) relative market-share.
HERE is last month’s CFTC data (for January 2020) as compiled and reported by Finance Magnates.
I have been waiting for 10 days, or so, for this month’s table of data from Finance Magnates, but for some reason FM has not published a current table.
So, I will attempt an abbreviated summary of the data here.
• For the month of January 2020, the 5 U.S. forex brokers held a total of $639,785,825 in customer funds, up 1.6% from December 2019. However …
• In February 2020, total customer funds on deposit at the 5 U.S. forex brokers declined sharply
(by 4.2%) to $612,866,604.• Four of the 5 U.S. brokers experienced losses of customer funds on deposit in February.
Only IG Markets (the smallest, and fastest growing of the five) experienced an increase (5%).• Reports we were getting throughout March indicated that the increased volatility in the forex market, together with the stay-at-home lock-down of citizens worldwide (due to the pandemic), had resulted in a dramatic increase in client funds on deposit, and in trading volumes (in March). If these reports are accurate, they will be reflected in the CFTC data for March, to be released in early May. Meanwhile …
• As of February 29, 2020, market-shares were changed only slightly from January, and were as follows:
- Oanda – 38%
- Gain Capital – 37.7%
- Interactive Brokers – 10.9%
- TD Ameritrade – 10%
- IG Markets – 3.5%
If (and when) Finance Magnates publishes their table for the current month, I will add it here as an edit to this post.