Every customer of a futures commission merchant (or "FCM") should become familiar with the series of "customer protection rules" finalized by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission in November 2013. While some of these rules went into effect in mid-January, many of them will be implemented over the next several months.
In short, these rules will require your FCM to provide you with new information about its business and risk management processes. Understanding what information will be available to you is the first step in the process of using the information to lower risk faced by your organization.
We have been meeting our clients and friends in order to help them understand how to use the new information as part of their internal risk management and broker monitoring programs.
To that end, we have prepared a relatively short presentation that is available for your review and download.
Significantly, the same customer protection rules are likely to be of interest to all customers of an FCM - those who trade financial products, those who trade energy products or physical commodities, those who trade cleared swaps, as well as U.S. exchange-traded and foreign futures contracts, etc. So, if you have a trading relationship with an FCM, then you should become familiar with these rules.
This article is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
