The Financial Times reported today that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is “aggressively hiring traders” to manage its growing securities portfolio.

The New York Fed implements the Fed’s monetary policy and according to the FT plans to increase the staff in its markets group to 400 by yearend. That is up from 240 at the end of 2007. And no wonder, the Fed has been purchasing fixed income securities at a record pace, doubling its holdings to more than $2 trillion in the last year according to the FT.

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Apparently, no where. In looking at the latest financial data for futures commission merchants that must be filed on a monthly basis, it seemed the amount in overall customer seg funds had dropped about $5 billion from the previous month (June data filed by July 31). But an inside the numbers look shows some surprises: A year ago, the total customer seg funds was a whopping $169 billion for the same period verses $138 billion in 2009. That certainly shows erosion in customer funds, which can be a rough gauge of customers in the market. But to give more perspective, for the same period in 2007, total customer seg funds were $115 billion, while a year earlier they were $106 billion. The summer months typically show a dip, and this year was no exception. Where were FCMs last fall when markets and companies were going off the charts? November 2008 had total seg funds of $166 billion. Overall all, discounting a few billion here and and a few billion there, the industry still has grown dramatically over the past couple years, at least according to the financial data filed into the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.