Swiss regulator fines five banks $91mln over Forex cartel

[mlawson71]

Citigroup Inc., Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Japan’s MUFG Bank Ltd. will be fined 90 million Swiss francs (91 mln. USD) by the Switzerland’s competition regulator for their role in a cartel to rig the foreign exchange markets, several weeks after the EU authorities fined the five banks over 1 billion Euro for the same affair.

Citigroup is fined 28.5 million francs, Barclays – 27 million francs, RBS – 22.5 million francs, JPMorgan Chase & Co. – 9.5 million francs, and MUFG Bank Ltd. – 1.5 million francs, reveals a statement by the Switzerland’s Competition Commission, also known as Weko.

Traders, working at Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and UBS , used chatrooms to fix leading currency exchange rates for over six years in a cartel known as the ‘Three-way banana split’.

 

[SteveH]

Forex is an unregulated market. I wouldn't expect anything less.

It's a piker's heaven though since the majority of at-homers around the world who "love it" can't afford to trade the U.S. e-minis. I don't like the micro e-minis personally (transaction fee gouging vs e-minis), but Forex types should migrate to them if they want a fair market with great volatility to catch trends.

 

[MarkBrown]

Forex is an unregulated market. I wouldn't expect anything less.

It's a piker's heaven though since the majority of at-homers around the world who "love it" can't afford to trade the U.S. e-minis. I don't like the micro e-minis personally (transaction fee gouging vs e-minis), but Forex types should migrate to them if they want a fair market with great volatility to catch trends.

agreed - i think the commissions rate will get better hopefully for the micro. the mini was the same way when it started out. the thing about the micro it would put budding traders into a real market and not fake crap like forex. if they can survive trading micro's even near break even then it's good training and much better than a demo account i would think. they didn't have demo accounts when i started out, still mixed if that was a good thing or not - everything went thru a real person.

 

[Sig]

Forex is an unregulated market. I wouldn't expect anything less.

It's a piker's heaven though since the majority of at-homers around the world who "love it" can't afford to trade the U.S. e-minis. I don't like the micro e-minis personally (transaction fee gouging vs e-minis), but Forex types should migrate to them if they want a fair market with great volatility to catch trends.

I think you might be confused as to what the banks did and to whom. It didn't involve pikers and e-minis wouldn't have helped anything for the customers impacted.

It was basically brokers front-running large i-banking customers and colluding in violation of anti-trust laws by disclosing large customer information among competitors. The e-mini doesn't have the volume to handle these type of customer's trades, and they're generally buying to hedge or transfer actual money from one currency to another for business purposes, not trade. You aren't one of these customers!