The National Futures Association (NFA) has announced the composition of an FX advisory committee. This gives retail FX its first official input into the regulatory process in the US. Retail FX firms have been lobbying for an advisory committee at the NFA for some years. Until now the strange situation has existed whereby members from the futures industry formulated rules for the FX industry with which they competed.
It is possible that the creation of the committee is connected to the efforts of the recently formed Foreign Exchange Dealers Coalition (FXDC) lobby group. The FXDC was set up to contest a recent proposal by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to limit customer trading leverage to 10 to 1 – a typical post-crisis, knee-jerk suggestion. It is usually the NFA that proposes rules and the CFTC that approves them.
The FX Advisory Committee will be chaired by Michael Stumm, CEO of Oanda. The other committee members are Drew Niv (CEO, FXCM), Muhammad Rasoul (COO, Global Futures and Forex), Anthony Siragusa (SVP, Easy Forex) and Glenn Stevens (CEO, Gain Capital).