Forex Club

What Is the Forex Club?

The forex club is a national association of wholesale foreign exchange professionals, dealers, brokers, and treasury managers whose primary goals are education and networking for its members.

Understanding Forex Club

A nation or regions' forex club will usually be affiliated with the Paris-based ACI Financial Markets Association, an umbrella organization for wholesale financial market professionals. ACI was founded in 1955. Today the ACI has more than 9,000 members in 63 national associations across six continents, with the mission of supporting best market practices and ethical conduct.

Forex clubs are a generic term and not related to Forex Club, a privately-held, for-profit company that provides trading platforms for FX, stocks, commodities, energy, and related instruments. Forex clubs, however, can include forex trading meetups, informally arranged meetings of individuals interested in trading the FX markets as a career. According to the social aggregating site, Meetup, over 200,000 individuals are members of forex meetups, with over 620 meetups currently in operation as of June 2021.

The large numbers of formal and informal forex clubs reflect the size of the global foreign exchange market. The FX market is the largest and most liquid in the world, with 90% of all trades involving the U.S. dollar (USD). The market is many multiples larger than the futures market and global equities market, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Forex Club and Trading Industry Standards

All ACI members, and thus all members of a forex club, must adhere to the principles contained in the recently formed FX Global Code. The code replaced national codes of conduct in Dec. 2017 and covers the FX, over-the-counter (OTC), and related financial markets. It is maintained by the Global Foreign Exchange Committee, an organization formed in 2017 to support a transparent global FX market.

The code includes global principles of good practice in the foreign exchange market and was formulated to support the integrity and effective operation of the wholesale foreign exchange market. The code resulted from the contributions of central banks and market participants around the world.

The membership of the ACI, and thus forex clubs, is not limited to FX or financial market participants. They typically include representatives from central banks, consultants, investment banks, asset managers, hedge funds, commercial banks, regulators, and academics. By including such a diverse group of professionals related to FX markets, one of the chief goals of forex clubs is to provide a forum for sharing best practices to ensure the optimal functioning of the markets.

In addition to networking, forex clubs affiliated with ACI have access to educational programs and specialized certifications for the FX, fixed income, money market, derivatives, and repo markets.