John P. Needham's Blog

As many know, the CFTC publishes a list of U.S. futures commission merchants (FCMs) and the amount of customer money they have in their Segregated U.S. Funds bank balances. Today they published the list for month-end July, 2012, to their website.

The CFTC report comes from the FCM’s CFTC 1-FR reports, which are part of the SEC FOCUS report if the FCM is also a broker/dealer in U.S securities. If the FCM is not also a broker/dealer registered with the SEC, then they submit just the 1-FR to CFTC.

Here is the latest report from CFTC: Latest CFTC Report

Here is the same list, sorted by FCMs’ Customer Segregated Funds balances. fcmdata0712-sorted-by-Seg

There is a lot of interesting information and data in the report: RJ O’Brien is the largest FCM in the U.S. as measured by Customer Seg, that is not also an SEC-registered broker/dealer in U.S. securities, for example. Another example: 8 of the top 10 names on the list all use the same vendor back-office system. There are 69 FCMs that reported Customer Seg to SEC and/or CFTC. (There were 71 as-of last October, when MF Global turned on their money vaporizer; there were 70 until Peregrine went down.)

But that’s not the most interesting thing to me. To me, the most revealing thing about the current report is this: In June of 2011, 13 months ago, FCMs in the U.S. reported a cumulative $153,881,560,188.00 in Customer Segregated Funds. (I used the CFTC report from that date to generate this post, where the data was sorted: June 2011 Sorted Data.

Today’s report from CFTC shows a cumulative Customer Seg figure of $143,561,983,577.00.

That means that customers of U.S. FCMs have pulled $10,319,576,611 out of their FCMs in the past 13 months of CFTC reporting.

Even if one assumes that MF Global lost/stole/vaporized $1.6 billion and that Russ Wasendorf at Peregrine stole another $200 million, there is still a full $8 billion-plus that customers of FCMs took out, entirely on their own.

FCM customers have options: ETFs, mutual funds, stocks (with SIPC protection), etc. It looks like many are utilizing the options, and departing the futures industry.

Tags: CFTC, MF Global, Peregrine, PFG, Seg Funds, U.S. Futures Customer Segregated Funds, Wasendorf

This entry was posted on September 13, 2012 at 12:40 am and is filed under CFTC, Customer Segregated Funds, FCM Data, MF Global, Peregrine, PFG, Seg Funds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.