Tuesday, June 28, 2011 NYMEX World Headquarters, New York City NFA will conduct a compliance workshop in New York on Tuesday, June 28 at the NYMEX building in New York. The workshop will focus on areas in which NFA Compliance staff has frequently found regulatory deficiencies, including registration issues, disclosure documents, recordkeeping, promotional material and anti-money laundering programs for IBs. For more information regarding details and registration, click here....

When: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. CT Where: CME Group Visitor’s Center Auditorium 141 W. Jackson, 5th floor Chicago, IL 60604 The current conditions in agricultural commodities have created much volatility in the grain markets. In anticipation of the June 30 USDA 2011 Acreage report, please join us in a discussion of the summer’s grain prospects and the impact of the recent weather crises. The discussion will also include a trader’s perspective on the new Weekly Grain Options, which provide opportunities to trade high impact events?such as USDA reports and weather conditions. Since their launch on May 23,…...

by Phil Donaldson and Candyce Edelen | PropelGrowth Phil Donaldson Email: [email protected] Twitter: @PhilDonaldsonNJ Phone: 212.812.3998 Candyce Edelen Email: [email protected] Twitter: @CandyceEdelen Phone: 212.738.9445, ext. 501 In today’s digital age, consumers and business people are looking to the Internet to find information to guide nearly every important decision they make. At the same time, their degree of patience for and trust in traditional advertising is plummeting. The statistics aren’t pretty. We found conflicting information about just how how bad it is, but suffice it to say, people generally don’t trust advertising. In his book “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber found…...

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.” that’s Segal’s Law. Successful trading comes from being able to make decisions with imperfect information. However, like the man with two watches, we often try to look for multiple indicators to confirm our decision before we make a trade. After all, we want as much going for us as possible. Yet, waiting for everything to be aligned in order to make a trade, means that you will most often be either wrong or late. By the time everybody agrees on anything, it…...

In the Future IBs and Financial Advisors Compete Head to Head By Mark Melin | Author High Performance Managed Futures and division director at PFGBest. In my last article, I mentioned that managed futures could grow to a $3 trillion industry rather quickly. This is an admittedly optimistic projection, but then I’ve been witnessing some very interesting developments that make this projection seem more plausible – and most of this is coming from the equity world. There are several well-known financial advisor-based firms that are preparing to descend on the managed futures industry with a force our industry has never seen.…...

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has proposed rule 1.71 that establishes conflicts of interest requirements for futures commission merchants (FCMs) and introducing brokers (IBs). The proposed rule is meant to deter non-research employees such as sales and trading personnel from influencing the content of research reports prepared by research analysts employed at the same company or an affiliate. The CFTC had a comment period which closed January 18th. There is no timeline for when a final rule may be published. The proposed rule was brought on by Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act…...

Earlier this year, the CFTC proposed the following amendments to certain Sections of Part 4 of the Regulations which affect the registration and reporting requirements of CTAs and CPOs, including: Requiring a new data collection system for CPOs and CTAs, including monthly and quarterly performance information for each commodity pool managed by a CPO. Rescinding the exemptions from registration of CPOs and CTAs. Increasing the threshold for qualification as a QEP.  Requiring annual audited financial statements for previously exempted pools operating under Regulation §4.7.  Require the annual filing of notices claiming exemptive relief. New risk disclosure requirements for CPOs and…...

Last week, Phil and I spoke at the National Introducing Brokers Association (NIBA) New York conference. We discussed the topic of lead generation and how IBs (introducing brokers) can use social media to grow their businesses. After the session, we had opportunity to talk to a number of IBs and CTAs (commodity trading advisors) about the challenges they encounter in building their businesses. Most rely heavily on cold calling, seminars, and referrals to generate new business. The common complaint we heard over and over is that these IBs and CTAs lack the time and resources to dedicate to building a…...

Dangers of Position Limits and Overreaching Regulation William Purpura, Managing Director | Great Lakes Global Limited The CFTC’s proposed position limits along with the complexity and immensity of Dodd-Frank has already caused market participants to take flight from the US markets to OTC and foreign markets which have less onerous regulation. The Commission has often dismissed the probability of regulatory arbitrage as paranoia. One only need to look at the impressive growth in the Brent crude oil contract traded in London in the wake of jawboning about position limits in the US that would affect the WTI crude contract on NYMEX.…...

Opinion by Rich Strait Today ETFs provide the smaller retail investor an ever-growing variety of products that offers indirect access to the futures markets via these securitized instruments. Transactions are done simply through the investor’s retail securities account, bypassing the requirement of maintaining a regulated futures account with an FCM. However, this comes at a relatively high cost to the investor. Fees, tax treatment and inefficient futures hedging practices hat may cause price correlation slippage between the ETF price and that of the underlying commodity must all be considered. Despite these pricing realities, the meteoric growth of ETFs has dramatically…...