The Financial Conduct Authority is negotiating a package of commitments for 11 commodity day traders, including a £1 million payment to the government's crisis fund, which will cap a three-year investigation into competition problems in the sector. Announced on June 24, 2026, the regulator said it had provisionally decided that the commitments were appropriate, while stressing that there had never been an opinion on whether the competition law had been violated and that the traders did not admit to violating the law.
The investigation focuses on behavior in commodity futures markets. The FCA said it is concerned that 11 people, who were daily traders in global commodity futures and mainly active in energy contracts such as natural gas and crude oil, may have prevented competition by exchanging potentially sensitive information about their trading intentions, positions and recent orders, and may have coordinated their trading strategies, during November 2020 as part of a group of traders known as part of a group of traders. Resources. The regulator's concern rests on the basic principle of market integrity: day traders provide funds and take risks from other participants, so for markets to operate competitively their trading decisions must be made independently instead of in concert.
Rather than denying the case, traders offered a set of binding commitments to address those concerns. Under the proposed package they will change the way they handle sensitive information, carry out annual competition law training, and arrange a £1 million ex gratia payment to the Crisis and Resilience Fund – a government scheme launched in April 2026, replacing the Household Support Fund, which provides support to low-income families and individuals in financial difficulty. The mechanism is within the Competition Act 1998, where firms or individuals under investigation can offer binding undertakings, which the FCA can accept if it is satisfied that it addresses its concerns, without finding or admitting a breach.
Financial goals are notable for going beyond what coercion would bring. The FCA has noted that the £1 million fine is likely to be greater than any fine it can impose on individuals following the breach, because competition law fines are typically up to 10% of a company's or individual's profits in the year before any decision. Directing money to a crisis fund rather than a public fund, and ensuring moral obligations alongside it, gives the regulator an outcome that it can present as equitable and constructive, while avoiding the costs and uncertainty of pursuing a case to an adversarial conclusion.
This approach reflects a broader regulatory choice in resolving competition issues through negotiated commitments rather than long-term enforcement. The commitment route allows the FCA to secure changes in behavior and funding relatively quickly, while the firms or individuals involved avoid detection of legal breaches – a trade-off that brings a quicker, more definitive outcome for both parties than a full enforcement process and contested fines. Graeme Reynolds, the FCA's director of competition, outlined the role of the regulator in ensuring that markets work well, saying that it considers all competition issues and takes action where appropriate.
Consultation on the package of commitments continues until 14 July 2026, after which the FCA will decide whether to accept the offer and close the investigation without deciding whether competition law has been breached. The result will add to the body of cases where the regulator has used the commitment method to solve competition problems in the financial markets, and the unusual method of payment of the crisis fund may draw attention to how those agreements are structured. Whether the FCA accepts the package as presented, or amends it based on feedback, will determine how the three-year investigation ends.
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