Foreign exchange
EBS moves into netting
LONDON – EBS is to establish a netting service to enable prime customers to net trades with their banks, as the spot broker looks to adapt to the changing landscape.
HSBC trades non-deliverable swaption
HONG KONG – HSBC last week traded the first ever option on a renminbi non-deliverable interest rate swap.
Weighing up the alternatives
Jeffrey Lins , Executive Director of Quantitative Analysis at Saxo Bank in Copenhagen, evaluates the pitfalls of using maximum drawdown-based performance measures, and points to recent advances that may help to expand opportunities for investment…
Salesmen and structurers are in demand, survey finds
LONDON – Forex sales professionals and options traders saw the highest turnover this year, and demand for these staff is set to increase in 2007.
The changing face of liquidity
Paul Ronan and Nicholas Hodder , of technology vendor City Practitioners, consider the impact the increasing prevalence of auto-trading capabilities is likely to have both on banks' efficiency and on spot traders themselves
JP Morgan launches implied volatility indexes
LONDON – JP Morgan has launched indexes tracking the level of G7 and emerging-market implied volatility, which it says will appeal to the wider institutional investor community.
Senior changes at US banks
LONDON & NEW YORK – JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have made senior management changes that will come into effect early next year.
High volatility sparks trading records
LONDON & CHICAGO – High volatility over the past three weeks saw record trading flow transacted across the major trading venues.
Quick, look busy! Here comes Mifid
Chip Lowry , senior managing director of State Street Global Link in Europe, looks at what Mifid will mean for the foreign exchange industry
Banks team up to launch benchmark currency indexes
LONDON & FRANKFURT – Deutsche Bank, UBS and Barclays Capital have signed up with iBoxx to launch currency indexes that they say will act as an industry-wide benchmark.
Forex fraudster fined $29 million and jailed
WASHINGTON DC & SAN DIEGO – The owner of a forex trading company has been fined $29 million and imprisoned for defrauding.
Reuters cuts EM options brokerage fees in half
LONDON – Reuters' decision to revamp its FX options matching system has increased competition for e-broking of options, with the prospect of slashed brokerage fees.
US options volume may break two billion
Chicago-based Options Industry Council (OIC) has reported both total US options volume and average daily options volume have increased by 36%.
History calls for caution on Kiwi
History suggests we may see one last squeeze higher over Christmas for the kiwi, says Rhiannon Healy, solutions specialist for ANZ in London
LiquidityHub hires chief executive, pooling banks' resources
Robert MacLeod has been made chief executive of London-based LiquidityHub, a venture that aims to electronically pool the fixed-income liquidity of 11 investment banks.
The mixed blessings of co-operation
Co-operation in the foreign exchange industry has generally tended to bolster the market.
Citigroup launches Islamic finance products in Singapore
SINGAPORE – Citigroup has launched commodity murabaha investments denominated in the US dollar, euro, pound sterling and Singapore dollar.
TwoFour connects to FXall
Technology vendor TwoFour Systems last week teamed up with multi-bank portal FXall to offer its clients access to prices directly through its own trading platform.
Citigroup and GSB sign memo of understanding
BANGKOK – Government Savings Bank (GSB), Thailand's state bank, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Citigroup in Thailand to start an international banking business that will launch in the first part of next year.
Asia focus for Bank Julius Baer
ZURICH & SINGAPORE – Bank Julius Baer is understood to be transferring Fred Etheart from Zurich to Singapore, where he will develop an institutional foreign exchange sales desk.
ASIA PACIFIC NEWS: ABN Amro pays $4.5m settlement in Vietnam forex trading case
HANOI – Dutch bank ABN Amro has paid $4.5 million to police to settle a dispute over allegations by the Vietnamese government that its traders broke FX trading regulations.
FXall in ruble push
MOSCOW – Multibank platform FXall has added five liquidity providing banks to bolster trading in the Russian ruble.
Algo trading to double, says Eurex
CHICAGO – "The rise in activity of algorithmic traders is impressive, and it's changing the nature of electronic trading," said Andreas Preuss, chief executive of Eurex.