Forex trading

FT
Retail forex trading has grown exponentially over the past decade. Alpari, which folded on Friday, was one of the top 10 retail forex providers and boasted back in 2011 of having 170,000 “live” clients: a more recent report from Citi estimated that there were 4m cottage currency traders globally.

Back in 2009, a company called Gain Capital, parent of Forex.com, issued an IPO prospectus. This revealed that total customer trading volume was growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 90 per cent, hitting $1.5tn in 2008. Gain’s profitability, meanwhile, was growing even faster: net income ballooned from $7m in 2004 to $230m in 2008. And this was just one of dozens of retail forex operators.