Forex Club

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

A national forex club is generally affiliated with the Paris-based ACI The 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 meetup.com, over 200,000 individuals are members of forex meetups, with over 700 meetups currently in operation as of July 2018.

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. The market is about 12 times larger than the futures market and 30 times larger than the global equities market, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements.

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 December 2017 and covers the FX, 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 contributions of central banks and market participants around the world.

The membership of the ACI and thus forex clubs is not limited to FX and other 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 repos markets.