Structure of forex brokers in the markets..!!!

The forex is unique among financial markets in a number of ways. One of these is that it was not traditionally used as an investment vehicle. It had, and still maintains to some extent, a somewhat more utilitarian purpose.

In today’s globalized economy, most businesses have some international exposure, creating the need to exchange one currency for another in order to complete transactions.

For example, Honda builds its cars in Japan and exports them to the United States, where an eager American buyer exchanges his dollars for a brand new Honda. Some of this money has to make its way back to Japan to pay the factory workers that built the car, but first those dollars have to be exchanged for Japanese yen, since that is the currency the Japanese factory workers are paid in.

Transactions such as this are facilitated by international banks and are done through a mechanism known as the foreign exchange market, or forex. Since banks are used to facilitate these cross-border transactions, they naturally want to be paid for their services.

 This payment comes in the form of a bid/ask spread – offering to buy the desired currency at a slightly lower price than they are willing to sell it at, and pocketing the difference. Considering the fact that more than $3bn moves through the forex market daily, these seemingly small fees can add up to a significant sum.

Since the 1970’s most of the world’s major currencies have been on a (mostly) free-floating exchange mechanism, allowing for exchange rates to be determined by market forces, that is, supply and demand. I say “mostly” because there have been times when major central banks have intervened in the market to manipulate exchange rates by either buying or selling large amounts of their currency, but normally this only takes place in extreme situations.

There are also other central banks that choose to manage their currencies much more strictly, but these are a minority in the developed world. So in most cases, this free-floating exchange rate mechanism allowed currencies to fluctuate against one another much more, and this in turn opened the door to speculation on the future movement of exchange rates.

The banks’ intimate knowledge of the forex market, and their high level of capitalization allowed them to be the first to speculate in the forex market, and to significantly increase their profits by doing so. An unfortunate consequence of this speculation however was that liquidity at certain times became scarce, and some necessary transactions could not be completed. In order to solve this problem, banks turned to expanding the number of participants in the market to include non-banks, thereby generating sufficient order flow (liquidity distribution) to complete clients’ transactions, and also to profit from these newer and less knowledgeable market participants.

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How forex brokers work

Like any other business in the history of business, your broker’s raison d’etre, is to make as big a profit as possible. There are about as many ways to go about this as there are brokers.

 For those who are in it for the long haul, however, it is generally best to adopt a set of practices which are deemed fair by their clients: certain boundaries are set, and operating beyond them can cost a brokerage its reputation, and along with it its clients. Straying outside these boundaries, therefore, is not considered as being in line with the long term goals of the business.

How strictly these boundaries are enforced, especially when there is little chance of clients ever even becoming aware of any transgression, again varies from business to business. For the sake of simplicity, in this article we assume that everyone in the business is squeaky clean, as if every client could peek into the broker’s back office at any time and dissect every trade. This is obviously not the case, and many brokers do take advantage of this opaqueness, but the details of that are best left for another discussion.

So without further ado, let’s get into the details of how forex brokers function. Somewhat removed from the top-tier interbank market, retail forex brokers are there to provide a service that would otherwise not be available, that is, giving an investor with a $10,000 bankroll the chance to speculate in the up-until-recently very exclusive forex market. There are generally considered to be 2 types of brokers providing access at the retail level: Electronic Communications Networks (ECNs) and Market Makers.

ECNs are generally somewhat more exclusive, requiring larger deposits to get started, but are seen as providing more direct access to the interbank market. As we will see, there are certainly advantages to this, but some disadvantages as well.

Market makers, on the other hand are more often than not, the counter party to their clients’ trades, creating somewhat of a conflict of interest, whereas ECNs profit from commission fees charged directly to the clients, regardless of the result of any trade, they are seen as being completely impartial – an ECN has no incentive for a client to lose money.

In fact, one could argue that an ECN stands to profit more if a client is successful, meaning that s/he will stay around longer and they will be able to collect more commission fees from them. A market maker, on the other hand, being the counterparty to a client’s trade, makes money if the client loses money, providing an incentive for some shady practices.

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