Question Summary:
“Islamic” Investment Banking, buying and selling.

Question Detail:

1) I asked this question before but never got a response or confirmation email, so I’ll ask again. It has to do with "Islamic" Investment Banking. I put quotes around the word Islamic because lately I feel it is not legitimately halal even if they don't deal with riba. This isn't like the last question about the person who works in the IT department. I actually work in the dealing room where we execute client orders and sometimes execute them on their behalf. The way it works is that clients download our platform wherein we have displayed over 30 instruments they can trade on. There are over 20 currencies, precious metals, and commodities, futures, and we even have options. Now although we don't charge our clients swap/interest I still feel like the work is haram. We offer our clients a leverage of 1:100 so it’s like they borrow in order to trade larger quantities which is normal foreign exchange trading because before it was just for companies who needed to exchange money but since the early 90s they made the leverage thing to allow regular traders to work in FX.

i) Isn't the buying/selling of currency to make profit haram even if there is no riba involved?
 
Also the gold/silver/oil that people can buy or sell they are only contracts for difference as in your not really buying it. It's not like if the client wants the barrels of oil or the ounces of gold he bought will actually be delivered to him.
Now a lot people argue that it's not haram because you can do all these types of analysis and read the market which is ok, there are people out there who make money off their analysis but the fact of the matter is 90% of traders lose money in this business and of the 10%who do profit only 3% remain making profit as the other 7% lose. I think that 3% that always makes money are the big zionist corporations that are running this world towards economic meltdown and keeping the trillions for themselves which another reason why I think its haram.
ii) So my question is, is it haram for me to work with a company like this since I have a lot of involvement in it?

2) Another question I had regarding this business is that we have people who are called introducing brokers. All these people do is introduce clients to us under their account and they get a continious commission from them. So for example he brings a client and every single trade that client opens the introducer gets a commission of 5-10 sometimes more dollars. Another way these introducers make money is through a rebate. So if a client they introduce opens a trade they get 10$ automatically everytime. So essentially they are not doing anything but introducing this client yet they get money off of every trade this person makes shouldn't they just get a 1 time introducing fee rather than a continuous one based on the trades they make? Would this type of work be haram?

Answer :

the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
 
As-salāmu ‘alaykum wa-rahmatullāhi wa-barakātuh.
 
1)
 
i) This question is not clear, could you please clarify further. Is this regarding trading currencies on the futures market or in general? Is there any real exchange of currencies taking place? Please do provide as much information as possible.
 
ii) The work being permissible or impermissible would depend on:
 
a) The nature of the work.
b) Whether the work has direct involvement or not in transactions.
c) The source of the funds from which the worker is being remunerated.
 
With regards to your query, the nature of the work itself is fine, however, since you are directly involved in the transaction the permissibility/impermissibility would depend on whether the orders being executed by yourself are permissible/impermissible. As for the source of the funds from which you are being remunerated, as long as majority of the company’s revenue is from halal sources the income would be permissible.
 
Hence, if a person is carrying out analysis and is not invloved directly in impermissible transactions then the income would be permissible.[1]
 
2) The ‘continuous commission’ received by the broker is not permissible. Instead the broker should receive a one-off payment (which would be a pre-determined figure) for his services.[2]
 
And Allah Ta’āla Knows Best
Mawlana Mohammed Patel
Student Darul Ifta
Zambia.
Checked and Approved by,
Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
www.daruliftaa.net