PETALING JAYA: Foreign exchange (forex) traders in the country are upset over a recent Bank Negara caution on forex trading and want the Government to liberalise the domestic forex trading sector.

The central bank had recently cautioned the public not to participate in any illegal investment or training programme on foreign currency trading offered by individuals or companies, both domestic and foreign.

In a random survey by StarBizWeek, forex traders, primarily online traders, questioned why the Government was “painting all forex traders with one brush as illegal just because of a few scams that happened.”

“The government said that there are authorised dealers but they are all banks. They do not have a forex trading system which assists and allows users to trade whenever and wherever.

“What we need are forex dealers like in other countries,” one forex trader said.

Another forex trader said traders were “not trading in ringgit, they do not take money from the public for trading and they do not act as a broker in Malaysia.”

Some traders in the country have been trading with legal foreign forex brokers such as those affiliated with and authorised by the National Futures Association (NFA), an industry-wide, self-regulatory organisation for the US futures industry.

Local traders are hoping for something similar, so that they can be authorised by the Government and work within an official domestic framework for private forex trading.

This would allow Malaysians to tap legally into the “US$3 trilion to US$4 trillion a day forex market,” local traders said.