Where the big money is, there is the abode for all major players. And forex is a very special place to be if that adage is true. It is no surprise that you will find all the big names of financial market of this world in the forex trading nodal positions. They are the key market players or the market participants, as the jargon goes.



Levels in Market Participants

We have bank to bank trading at the top of the strata and the participating banks are the large investment banks. The access to this level is hardly available to those not in the same circle. These bank to bank transactions are within the slender margin- called the spread- which is the difference between buy and sell price. The spread widens as we go down the level but here it is truly as sharp as the razor's edge.

Several funds, including pension funds, insurance funds etc take part in the forex market in a big way with huge volumes for small spreads.

Banks generally trade for their own account out of their own reserves. And this amounts to several billions of dollars everyday. They also let their trading account holders to trade along on speculative basis but this accounts for small a percentage in their scale of operations.

An important part in the foreign exchange market is played by corporations that want foreign currencies to make payments for their overseas service or goods transactions. In a way this is the essence and reason for the whole forex market to exist. Fundamentally, since, this is not speculative trading of currencies the companies' forex trading hardly has any effect on the short term prices and so can be treated as a trend as to which direction the market is moving for a given currency.

When forex markets fluctuate violently, even for a short term, the national central banks enter the market in a regulatory position. With the might of substantial forex reserves to either infuse or diffuse inflation or artificial demands, they try to control the money supply. More often than not, the rumors that central banks are entering the markets act positively to stabilize the fluctuations, let alone enter in actual place.

There are large number of middle level players such as investment management funds, hedge funds etc which act on behalf of their clients. This is largely for their or their clients' payment necessities overseas for the equities or similar investments. Like the payment based trading in the case of corporations, this doesn't count up as speculative trading and will not impact the short term speculative market.

We see retail forex broker and day traders in the last who really account for considerable volume sheer by their numbers.