Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank
I received an email from my broker, Advanced Currency Markets (ACM) about 2 weeks ago. The email read:
Dear Customer,
As you probably know, the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) entered into force on July 15th 2010
in the USA. The DFA imposes many obligations to American banks as well as to foreign
banks. As a Swiss bank we are therefore also impacted especially in the field of
forex and precious metals.
Indeed the DFA sets out that a financial intermediary, no matter its location, is
not authorized to execute forex transactions with retail US residents without a
proper license. The deadline for foreign banks and institutions to be granted such
a license has been set to July 15th 2011.
We had hoped to be granted an extension of the compliance deadline as there were
some discussions in the US Congress regarding a possible postponement of the entry
into force of the DFA (possibly end of year 2011) but it is now highly unlikely
that these discussions will come to a positive conclusion.
As Swissquote Bank Ltd will not be granted the proper license before the deadline,
Swissquote will be deemed a "prohibited counterparty" after July 15th
2011. Our database indicates that you are resident in the USA. Therefore we regret
to inform you that if you are not an eligible contract participant as defined in
section 1a of the US Commodity Exchange Act (text available under:
http://www.cftc.gov/LawRegulation/CommodityExchangeAct/index.htm
Needless to say, I was a little upset. I have been trading with ACM (now Swissquote Bank) for five years. I honed my skills at writing MQL code on their MT4 platform. I got to know and like the people who work there. They treated me in a professional manner but some of them also grew to be friends.
Now I have to look for another broker - one that I can trust to treat me like a person and not a customer number. I have referred a number of my friends around the globe to ACM and they've all had positive experiences with them. I highly recommend them.
So, if you're not a U.S. citizen you can open a live or demo account with ACM and form a personal relationship with a trusted broker. If you are a U.S. citizen, you're going to have to wait until Swissquote complies with Dodd-Frank and gets properly licensed.
At any rate, when Swissquote does get its act together, to quote The Terminator, "I'll be back."