- Number of Forex accounts held with US forex brokers drops by more than 11,000 to all time low of 97,206
- Clients' profitability is up 6.4% on average, second consecutive quarter that profitability is improving
- OANDA is still the most 'profitable' broker although just 0.1% above GFT
US retail forex industry is now showing obvious signs of slow down with number of non-discretionary retail forex accounts held with US based reporting brokers down to record 97,206. This is the lowest count reported since Q3 2010 when first such report was released. Reasons can be many but without any doubt extreme regulatory climate has made it extremely difficult for American brokers to attract new clients. In fact only Forex Club and Tradestation have reported growth in number of accounts they hold.
American brokers now face very high compliance and regulatory costs on one hand while on the other they are not competitive as leverage, FIFO and hedging requirements forced foreign clients look elsewhere. American traders themselves were forced to either comply with those requirements or simply exit the market (and hopefully for NFA the futures lobby: go back to trading futures). There might be other explanations to this such as seasonal slowdown and relatively low Volatility . Brokers may have been moving foreign traders to their foreign subsidiaries - as same trader in a foreign subsidiary is more profitable than in the American one due to the reasons mentioned above. However regulation without any doubt had a huge impact on this industry's slowdown.
FXCM in the past published a study about profitability of traders during low volatility times which may explain the rise in average profitability.
OANDA is still the most 'profitable' broker with 39% of its clients being profitable in Q4 2011. GFT is just 0.1% with profitability of its clients jumping 13.7%. PFG's profitability jumped 14.6% and Interbank's 10.0%. Amazingly profitability of all brokers improved in Q4 2011. Seems that traders in general were happier this quarter.
See the Q3 2011 profitability report.
