Education

• Print
• E-Mail

According to the BIS study Triennial Central Bank Survey 2004

53% of the transactions were interbank or interdealer strictly

33% of the transactions dealt with a fund manager or an kind of financial institution not associated with banks and a dealer (like bank for instance).

14% were held between non financial organizations and dealers.

Commercial banks take the majority of currency deals. Accumulating the markets exchange conversion cumulative needs due to clients' operations as well as means accommodation or attraction and their movement to other banks are the main bank activities. Banks can carry out their independent deals for their own purpose aside from customers. Large international banks such as Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Union Bank of Switzerland, Citibank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Chartered Bank affect the exchange markets in the world considerably by the daily operations at the amount of billions dollars. Such dramatic volumes can have an influence on the currency price or the quotation. Such large players usually contain the groups of bulls and bears.

The interbank market deals with the commercial turnover majority as well as speculative trading considerable amounts carried out daily. Billions of dollars is possible turnover for a large bank. Besides the customers' transactions, the majority of the operations are made for the bank's own account and by proprietary desks.

The exchange brokers from abroad led the major part of their business by creating low-paid anonymous counterparts and facilitating interbank transactions some time ago. Recently the majority of this business got down to using such electronic systems as EBS, Reuters Dealing 3000 Matching (D2), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Bloomberg and TradeBook(R). The traders are still listening in on ongoing interbank trading through the brokers squawk box but the trading amount got much smaller lately.

"Bulls" is the name for the participants of the Forex market who try to make the currency price higher.

Bears are supposed to be concerned with the currency price reduction in the Forex market. The common market process is a balance between bulls and bears market and in case of a currency price change it is mostly not very significant. Though when either bulls or bears take the lead the exchange prices may change dramatically.

Commercial companies are one of the key financial players as far as they are interested in foreign exchange in order to pay for goods produced or services provided. These companies usually deal with small trading amount comparable with the banks or speculators but can have a brief effect on the market rates. Still, the streams of foreign trade are the important factors affecting the permanent currency rates. The exposures of some multinational companies happened due to covering very large positions can have a strong effect of the market in case the players are not aware of these processes.

Investment Management Firms. They usually deal with considerable accounts being the assets of such customers as pension funds and endowments. are quite important players for the exchange market as far as they use it to make the transactions of their foreign securities easier. For instance in order to pay for and redeem foreign equities purchases and sales the manager of an investment company having an international equity portfolio will have to deal with the certain market that will force him to sell or buy foreign currencies. The purpose of such transactions is profit increase and they are not considered as speculative, being secondary for the investment decisions. There are special Currency Overlay units included in the investment management firms that try to make profit of customers' assets with a minimum risk using currency operations. These transactions may have an affection on large trades as far as the number of the dedicated currency managers in not high whether amount of their AUM (assets under management) is considerable.

• EUR / USD
• USD / JPY
• GBP / USD
• USD / CHF
• AUD / USD
• USD / CAD
• EUR / JPY
• AUD / JPY
• GBP / JPY
• EUR / GBP
• GBP / CHF
• EUR / CHF