How many traders are there?

I am trying to get my head around what kind of size fish i am and in what size pond i am swimming.

I understand that most of the money in for ex is traded by the large banks or institutions and that most of us here at ff are using retail brokers, some ECN's but would anyone like to give an estimate of what kind of percentage us minions make up?

I mean if one day we all stumbled upon a system that truly worked and we all traded it, would there be a significant impact on the market or are we so small that it would go unnoticed?

This may be a completely unanswerable question but even just a ball park figure would do, 0.011, 10%?

My thoughts so far are based on the following broad assumptions,

There are just over 40,000 members here at ff.

I can think of 4 other large forums, babypips, TSD, fxstreet, forexforum,

there are 20,000 on baby pips, don't know about the others but FF claims to be the largest forum on the net so if we said at the very most there were 40,000 on the other two then we end up with: 160,000

Now i am one that believes in conservative estimates so lets for arguments sake triple this figure to take into account all other smaller forums, people who browse but are not registered and every other kind of participant.

Again i may be totally wrong and please feel free to give any ideas/input.

This figure comes to almost half a million, would anyone agree
These are people that could be trading, probably a lot less will actually be doing it, even less live and even less of them profitable.

Thats my estimate anyways. What kind of impact this many people would have is beyond me, but it would be interesting to know

Just food for thought in my journey to understand this crazy world of Forex!

I doubt that we have any impact on the market. Here's why:

Retail brokers account for 25-50 billion in daily volume on the forex market. Add on the other banks, hedge funds, etc, and the daily volume comes out to 1 trillion.

It's safe to assume that here at FF we control probably 10 billion--including leverage (to make the math easy).

1,000,000,000,000 / 10,000,000,000

If the above is true, we account for 1%.



Just my thinking anyway.

Hey there, thanks for your reply,

So you think 1%, sounds feasable, if you dont mind me asking how do you come to the 10 billion figure?

10 bil divided by my 500:1 leverage is 20 million. I figure the more prominent members here have million dollar accounts and tack on my $30k account and a few others.



Basically, I tried to get a best-case scenario. Clearly, the real value will probably be way off. More like 2 bil now that I think of it.

O.k. i see where your coming from.

I suppose when you think about it, it really is difficult to make an accurate guess but i'll settle for 1%. I suppose 90% of that 1% is actually pouring money in due to losses, and 10% is taking money out, (if you believe the figures bounded around).

The only real way to tell would be to add up all the reatial brokers accounts

You can also take a look at the COT reports here:
http://cftc.gov/dea/options/deacmelof.htm

It's basically the chicago merc's combined options and futures contracts that are open every tuesday.

Currently there's 58212 long and 65308 short and 28222 hedging. That's 150k contracts of 125k euro a piece. That's 18.75 billion euro. Current rate is 1.55 or so, that's 29 billion dollars worth of contracts traded.

Then there's the other exchanges, and OTC forex with no definitive volume data.

We don't have any impact on the market. Most of our trades bucketed or aggregated into a whole, only the net trade would ever be placed, and even that's only a fraction of the overall volume.

I don't think membership is a good metric for effect tho. Most of the members probably don't actively trade (maybe did at one point, then poof) or are demo warriors.

I realise now that i have tried to answer the question comming from the wrong way, you are absoloutely right that using members list is no good, there are much more accurate sources as you have stated.

The answer still seems to be that we are insignificant (poor us eh)

99% of traders on forums like FF, forex-tsd constitute less than 0.1% of daily forex volume. Very few like less than 1% may be trading very heavy volumes and be playing somewhat significant role in forex. But mostly its banks and large funds.