Phil - it was in the WSJ this am; here's a bit more info from AP. Bloomberg's may also have a fuller story. Personally I think it's rather dangerous; it's a little over a year to the next US election, and the proposal - while helping banks via ...

Single-Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit

There's better information here: url Particulatly note the paragraph: Membership in NFA is mandatory, assuring that everyone conducting business with the public on the U.S. futures exchanges-more than 4,200 firms and 55,000 associates-must adhere ...

Proposed NFA Capital Requirement

The first thing I would suggest you do is to find out what the difference is between brokers and market makers. They operate under very different conditions. I think once you understand that, what happens on FX as vs stocks will become pretty ...

Why do spreads become so large when news is released?

For 1)the thread is on fx capitalization requirements, not regulatory overkill in the nanny state (which is what the complaint against FXCM seems to be). As for 2), I just do my own due diligence, but I do enjoy this discussion...

Proposed NFA Capital Requirement

As long as everything stays "normal", . It's funny, I play with them a lot, but I've never tried it on something explicitly "hard", like a Cauchy distribution. Maybe I should. The basic filter is pretty easy, for most sane languages, and doable in ...

Trading The "Normal State"

It's worth reading through the actual complaint on this one to see what happens when bean counters go wild, but it doesn't actually reflect much re. the stability of FXCM.

Proposed NFA Capital Requirement

For static (or instantaneous) prices, this is true. But prices aren't static, and trades take a finite time to execute. For me, it's not a significant deal, because my acct is too small to take advantage of it. For a bank or a big trader ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Pretty much, except that in that role the USD is acting as a vehicle currency - there's a number of good papers available from the FRB on such, this one ( url ) goes into a bit of background, though it dates from the 90's. OTOH when it is the ccy ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Lol, I think we are working along the same lines here..The only problem is is that the robots can only guess at what the demand for the other legs might be; from what I understand it's based on things like kalman filters & bayesian analysis & ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Only sort of....The relationships hold if everything is static. The fun is when something unusual happens. Suppose on a nice quite Sunday night, somebody decides he just has to have to buy a few billion Euros using Yen. Eur/JPY will shoot up like a ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Exactly. Triangle trades used to be pretty hot (but that was before my time) now it's pretty much of a non-issue except whent the market is moving quickly. Any deterministic jump on a major pair -like when all the Japanese FX grandmas decided to ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Taleb has interesting comments re. Neiderhoffer in his book Fooled by Randomness - i.e about playing trading as one would a competitive sport (rather than a survival means), and putting too much faith in stats. Or like he said in one of the articles ...

How many blow-ups are necessary in order to become a pro?

Re the interest, there I agree with NewstraderFX; essentially the effective interest is relative to the money you have at risk, not the nominal value of the contract - so essentially it is (your leverage)*(swap rate), annualized. For example - ...

Trading The "Normal State"

I wouldn't worry too much about OPEC; it's market share has dropped from 70% a decade ago to maybe 40% now. Big drivers in US oil prices have been things like processing problems (particularly last winter), the falling $, speculation (a good article ...

I see oil reaching 100 USD?!

Well, here one should look at individual carrys. For example, the S&P/Dow could easily become less desirable ifthe CDO issue surfaces again - and given that a large number are held as supposedly cash reserves for businesses not normally involved in ...

Trading The "Normal State"

I'm not PeterM, but that being said - USD/CAD and oil are strongly related as the US buys large amounts of oil (and gas) from Canada (Canada is the US's largest external source). Because the US is essentially trading USD to Canadian producers for ...

Anyone here hold positions for weeks or even months?

That tie is pretty well known; it just depends on the level of hot money available from Japan. China floats it's ccy (which would allow JPY to strengthen), or Japan raises rates, or any number of similar factors, that up trend will just go poof....

Trading The "Normal State"

It's not really applicable because it would depend on the dealer (the market) being able to adjust the game to how much money you have in your hand. In that sense it is also not really a paradox. Note you can also win the game if everytime you have ...

Trading The "Normal State"

NewstraderFX - you are advocating: But elsewhere: I happen to agree with the second, but could never support the first, because there is no way in advance of knowing how far a 'correction' will go. As I pointed out, GBP/JPY is still down 50% from ...

Trading The "Normal State"

Guess I'm more than a little dubious of anyone who pretends to define the "normal" state of the economy and/or especially market values. It's a bit like using the "normal" state of the Gulf Coast weather as a reason to go long in New Orleans ...

Trading The "Normal State"