News/Wholesale
BarCap picks Caplin for rates
LONDON - Barclays Capital has signed a contract to purchase web-based application Caplin Trader for its fixed-income electronic commerce system.
Interbank lending eases further
LONDON - The Ted spread, along with overnight and three-month Libor, fell for the fourth day in succession after European governments announced bail-out packages on Monday (October 13), and the US followed suit on Tuesday.
Ex-Lehman UK staff find new FX roles
LONDON - Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Standard Chartered and JP Morgan have all moved to make further hires from Lehman Brothers' former foreign exchange team.
Credit Suisse launches currency basket options
LONDON - Credit Suisse has introduced currency basket options on Merlin, its proprietary electronic foreign exchange structured products trading platform, in response to client demand.
Mixed forecast for FX
LONDON - Foreign exchange teams will avoid the worst of the job cuts in the City of London, although market sources warn no-one will be immune from redundancies.
Hotspot FX hires Asia sales head
SINGAPORE - Hotspot FX has appointed Trent Beacroft as head of Asia sales in Singapore.
BNP and Deutsche give homes to Lehman staff
LONDON - Not all Lehman Brothers' refugees have ended up at Nomura - BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank have also stepped in to make hires.
FX traders exercise caution
GLOBAL - Traders worldwide continue to avoid dealing with each other, despite co-ordinated efforts by global central banks to ease the turmoil in the financial market through rate cuts and fund injections.
Japan traders dump short yen positions
TOKYO - Japanese retail foreign exchange margin traders abandoned $16 billion worth of short yen positions within days last week, in a scramble to limit losses from unwinding carry trades.
Colombia fruitful for Citi settlement
BOGOTA & NEW YORK - Citi's Colombia-based domestic settlement service began settling more than $1.3 billion in FX trades daily in September, representing in excess of 80% of the Colombian wholesale FX market.
JDFX gets smart with Kontrol
ZURICH - Foreign exchange trading company JDFX has capitalised on an increasing focus on risk management within financial markets by launching Kontrol, a system built to eliminate inefficiencies and dangers caused by calculating risk several times a day…
Korea's KEB begins trading on EBS
SEOUL - Interdealer broker Icap is deepening its footprint in the emerging markets, with Korea Exchange Bank (KEB) now using its spot-broking system, EBS.
ICE launches FX futures
ATLANTA - The Intercontinental-Exchange (ICE) is launching ICE Millions, a suite of foreign exchange futures contracts, on November 6, in the latest move by an exchange to capitalise on fears over counterparty credit risk.
Icap spot forex surges 60% after Lehman Brothers collapses
LONDON - Spot foreign exchange volumes at Icap skyrocketed by more than 60% on September 15 and 16, days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Another FX trader fined
STOCKHOLM - Sweden's financial regulator has imposed a maximum penalty on Forex Bank for insufficient money laundering controls, signalling a global clampdown by regulators on risk management failings at retail foreign exchange institutions.
OMS vendors tackle multi-asset risk
LONDON - Order management system (OMS) vendors are enhancing their multi-asset pre-trade analytics to address the growing trend among financial institutions of broadening the asset classes and geographies in which they trade.
Sentimental value
Naomi Fink, Japan strategist in global markets sales and trading at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ in Tokyo, assesses the slump in corporate sentiment in Japan, and what this bodes for the country's economic growth
Gold rush on Lehman's European FX team
LONDON - Dealers are willing to pay top dollar for Lehman Brothers' foreign exchange team in Europe, following the failure of administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to agree a sale of the defunct bank's European fixed-income unit last week.
GFT deepens footprint in London
LONDON - GFT is expanding its London presence, with two hires in the city.
New Fortex FX v5 cuts trade times
REDWOOD SHORES, CALIFORNIA - Multi-asset trading platform vendor Fortex has released its fifth version of Fortex FX, which cuts average roundtrip trade times to five milliseconds from 40 while supporting 500 trades per second.
RBS launches new forex index
LONDON - RBS launched FX Radar Index, an automated index linked to 20 emerging market currencies, on October 1.