Millionaire Tradersat HSBC, and you would ask for a quote on a pair. The lady in
the “cage” would call a hotline and ask for a quote and you’d say,
okay buyxamount at that price. Now you can just log onto the
internet and trade instantly, but I am actually glad I got in at the
beginning. It’s nice to see the FX market grow and flourish over
the past several years.
Q: One of the things that differentiates the FX market from
every other electronic market out there is that it’s a spread-based
market. It doesn’t have commission, but on the flipside you are not
allowed to buy on the bid or sell at the offer. You have to pay the
bid offer spread. At that time the bid offer spreads must have been
considerably larger than they are now right?
A: Yes. I’m pretty sure, from what I remember when they’d give
us the quote, it was ten pips. So you had to be patient and be a
good trader, look at it from a longer perspective because if you
took the offer, for example, you had to make 15 pips just to be
up 5 pips wide. So, yeah, it was like that back then and I’ve seen
those spreads steadily come down and at some places its now just
two or three pips wide on majors. It is just so much more liquid
now.
Q: As a matter of fact there was a recent article inFinancial
Timessaying that next year the foreign exchange market is going
to do 3.6 trillion per day.
A:Wow.
Q: The growth of it is just massive. And they are actually attribut-
ing quite a lot of it to the advent of retail traders coming into the
market, which was absolutely nonexistent at that time. If you were
trading at a 10-point spread, your typical holding period must have