Bloomberg launches FX Dashboard

NEW YORK - Bloomberg is continuing to broaden its foreign exchange capabilities with the rollout of FX Dashboard, a single grid to access analytics, data, news and trading capabilities on the Bloomberg Professional terminal.

The grid, which began rollout with clients last month, enables users to select, build and monitor custom views of the FX markets using real-time prices, technical indicators, price action analysis, high/low analysis, implied and realised volatility matrixes and standard deviation cones.

"It's a grid of real-time data that allows customers to look at currency pairs they're interested in and then choose the data field they want to see, be that current bid and ask in the market, the day's high, moving average ratios, one hour volatility, the level of implied risk reversals, and then trade off the grid," Philip Brittan, New York-based global head of FX at Bloomberg, told FX Week.

FX Dashboard comes with up to 30 predefined views but proprietary views can be built using FX market data including spot, forwards, implied volatilities, realised volatilities, risk reversals, realised kurtosis and Garch volatility across a universe of currency pairs.

In addition to being able to retrieve and monitor fields such as change on day, moving averages and high and lows, users can establish custom measures including spreads, sums, ratios and ad hoc equations using multiple inputs. The new measures can be embedded into additional new measures, the vendor said.

FX Dashboard was initially conceptualised for real-time clients such as hedge funds, prop traders and active trading desks as well as interbank desks. "But because it is so flexible and allows you to look at return analysis, sharp ratios and standard deviation cones, it appeals to a wide variety of clients," said Brittan.

As such, the range of users includes portfolio managers, hedge funds, risk managers, analysts and active traders. "We've got a lot of equity guys who have FX exposure that are using this," added Brittan.

Overall, the platform has opened 2009 returning to conditions seen prior to last autumn's financial meltdown. During that period, trading on the platform largely tracked the market, said Brittan. "In the early fall we saw people moving away from trading on auto-pricers from banks and more into trading in a free form with the salespeople using Instant Bloomberg. But now the multi-bank request-for-quote and click-and-deal trading is very robust."

Our customers tell us some of the more automated platforms and pricing engines shut down or get very wide or find it a little hard to find liquidity. But because we seamlessly move into manually provided liquidity on our system we get very positive feedback from customers that they can always get a deal done on Bloomberg."