Forex Market Participants

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The Forex market is the biggest market in the world, with various parties exchanging hands during the trading week. From retail traders (average Joe trader) to big institutional players, investment houses, brokers, commercial and central banks, everyone is having a say in the Forex market. It means that the moves this market makes are not possible to be influenced by any one entity, due to a large number of participants that exchange currencies daily. As a rule of thumb, the more liquid a currency pair is, the most difficult to influence the way it moves. To have an idea about the size of this market, imagine that every day five trillion dollars’ worth of transactions are changing hands. This makes the Forex market the most unpredictable market of them all, with many people looking for the holy grail in trading. The fact that it is so huge attracts immense interest. Players interested in trading big volumes cannot do that in other markets due to lack of liquidity. For example, imaging hedge funds that have an issue with scalability. The bigger the fund gets, the more difficult it is to enter a market and exit without causing significant disruptions. Such a problem doesn’t exist in the Forex market. No matter the size, there will always be a counterpart interested in what you’re offering. The idea of this article is to bring in front of you the parties involved in this market and why it is important to know who we, as retail traders, are facing. Some of the participants may seem familiar, some not, but in the end what matters is to keep in mind that all influence the price action of the currency pairs that form the Forex dashboard.

Who’s Who in the Forex Market

Our financial system, the way it exists today, is centered around the world’s reserve currency: the U.S. dollar. Having said that, it means that every international transaction should be denominated in the end, or cleared, in dollars. This makes the role of the Federal Reserve of the United States crucial in the way the global financial system works. It is worth mentioning here that it is not clear if this is a burden or a privilege for the U.S. economy.

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Retail Traders

To the surprise of many, retail traders are making the smallest and least representative part of the whole Forex market. Roughly five percent of the overall Forex market is made from the transactions the retail traders take. However, due to the huge size of the overall market, this is quite a chunk of the Forex brokers industry. Moreover, it is increasing every day as more and more people are drawn to the trading circle as worldwide Internet access is on the rise. Retail traders are either scalpers (involved in short-term oriented trading, looking for small profits that result from quick entries and exits daily), swing traders (keep their positions open for a few hours to a few days) and investors (have a bigger time horizon in mind when it comes to a trade’s outcome). Brokers are using this information to offer different packages for each category.

Commercial Banks

Commercial banks have designated treasury departments that deal with exchanging currencies both on behalf of the bank and for investing purposes. The cost of keeping a cash position is quite high and banks are striving to move money as quick as possible and with as little expenses as possible. These banks have various options for that: either they park the excess money to the central bank using the overnight facility deposit rate, or will loan to the economy (to people and businesses). Nowadays with negative rates in many parts of the world, commercial banks are stimulated to lend the money rather than keeping them in the central bank’s vaults. The perfect example to illustrate how commercial banks participate in the Forex exchange market is to consider a merger and acquisition deal between two companies from different countries. Let’s say, a company from the United States wants to buy one from Eurozone. To pay for it, it must use Euro. To have Euros, it must buy them from the open market or give a mandate to a consortium formed out of representative banks that, against a fee, will make sure the best possible rate for the deal is reached. Therefore, banks are directly involved in exchanging currencies for both people and business entities. Commercial banks are an important part of the interbank market.

Central Banks

forex market

Believe it or not, central banks are having trading departments that monitor the Forex market and, from time to time, intervene in the market. SNB (Swiss National Bank) and BOJ (Bank of Japan) are two of the notorious banks for intervening in the market to influence the way their currencies (Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen are moving). Moreover, sometimes, different monetary policy need market intervention to be implemented. When the SNB imposed the 1.20 floor on the EURCHF cross, this meant the central bank bought the EURCHF pair every time it got closer to the floor rate. Even today, with quantitative easing programs ongoing in many important central bank jurisdictions, market intervention is the norm. For example, the European Central Bank is still buying government and corporate bonds monthly, and the way these bonds and their yield are moving, they influence the Forex market as well.

High-Frequency Traders

These are computer programs or robots designed to buy and sell thousands of trades per second and generate small profits on each trade. They are responsible for the aggressive and instant moves the market makes when economic releases hit the wires.

Forex Brokers

Forex brokers are an important part of the interbank market as they have special trading departments as well. Depending on the way a brokerage house is organized and functions, it may route its client’s orders to a liquidity provider for execution, or keep part or all the orders in house. For the part that remains in-house, the broker takes the opposite site of the trade. This strategy is based on the statistic that over ninety percent of the Forex retail traders are losing their first deposit and it means it is easier for the broker to make a profit if it is positioning on the other side. As you can see, Forex market participants are from different areas and with different backgrounds, but one thing is common for them all: they all want to make a profit from the way currencies are moving. Therefore, the one that gets trading right, stands the most chances to profit from these moves.

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