Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – is the independent federal agency that is in charge for supervision of futures trading market of the United States of America. This body was established in 1974 and is located in Washington. Up to then, futures trading markets were supervised by Commodity Exchange Authority (CEA) which was the branch of the US Department of Agriculture.

At present, a main goal of СFTC is to ensure competitive and efficient performance of futures markets, protection of commodity market participants from fraudulent activity, acts of manipulation and abuse encountered in trading commodities. Mission of the regulating body is to legally protect participants of commodity trading. Among all, CFTC controls and supervises activities of the companies offering services on trading with derivatives which main asset is currency quote obtained as the result of interbank trading on FOREX market. In particular, the list of standards applied to the activity of retail forex players was elaborated within framework of CFTC, primarily covers risk warning. According to the last, client shall be notified that speculations with contracts denominated in foreign currency with the help of Forex leverage can lean to loss of money funds exceeding level of deposit. Client shall be warned that trading is not performed on centralized market. Besides, it shall be conveyed that trading platform acts just as means of communication with a dealer and is not related to exchange or trading system.

In addition, CFTC sets clear-cut financial requirements to FOREX companies. One of the most important regulation standards are listed in the "Trading and operational standards" clause which makes FOREX company keep detailed account of client orders including date and time of receipt of client order, price of execution, client identification details, name of trading contract, order type, volume of transaction, information on account balance of client, amount of costs and commissions, amount of net profit/loss on trading position. These standards include number of requirements placing limits on possibilities of manipulations with the terms of financial contract.

CFTC regularly issues various weekly, monthly and annual reports containing abundant statistics on players of financial market and conducted transactions.

Commitments of Traders reports serves remarkable example and contains volume of transactions concluded on the futures market.