Is Oanda the largest Forex broker in the world? It certainly has much more money than FXCM

Forex Brokers need to register as FCMs with the NFA and they also have to file monthly statements detailing certain business aspects. There’s nothing more that brokers hate than disclosing financial information – but for us it’s a chance to see who has how much…

In a recent report we can see that Oanda has $50M more than FXCM in Net Capital. While FXCM is always proud of being very rich, it appears that there’s someone much richer. Actually even Gain and GFT are not that far behind.

Why am I surprised? Frankly, although I know Oanda is a large broker, it’s also a very ‘below the radar’ broker – most of the marketing and news you hear about comes from FXCM and to a lesser degree from Gain and GFT. Looks like Oanda is doing a lot of work but in a much quieter and effective way.

The top 4 largest US Forex brokers by Net Capital are:

Oanda - $161m

FXCM - $113m

Gain - $95m

GFT - $87m

Is Oanda the largest retail Forex broker in the world?

Unlike FXCM Oanda didn’t publish its monthly volume for quite a while. Back in 2007 it reported 400,000 trades a day and $200B in monthly volume, while FXCM reported only 200,000 trades a day not long ago and had same $200B in volume in 2007 with $500B by the end of 2008.

Oanda is also very active in different offerings than other brokers, and might be right in doing so given recent NFA requirements, such as exchange and funds transferring.

Given the rapid growth of Forex Trading volumes Oanda might have surpassed FXCM in monthly trading volumes by now.

I couldn’t get Oanda’s people to comment on this subject.

Michael