flash crashes
Well Monday’s column put the cat amongst the pigeons – as writing about SNB-Day and re-papering trades always does. I am indebted as always, to those of you who shared and re-lived your experiences, the only pity was we were not in the usual location for the swapping of war stories! The exception, it is […]
There was, naturally, quite a lot of attention on the return of EUR/CHF to 1.20 on Friday, most of if, naturally again, frivolous. On a return basis, anyone who didn’t care about mark-to-market would have been back in the black in the mid-1.19s thanks to carry, but that didn’t stop people like me joining in the frivolity, tweeting the market may have an issue working through the 1.20005 offer for 20 yards. It shows though, how much the event is embedded in the market’s psyche that we are commenting about it.
One of the reasons I enjoy our conferences so much is the capacity of the high quality speakers with whom we are fortunate to engage to raise a point that just makes you think, “why have we not done this before?”
This week we held our inaugural Frankfurt conference and during our Technology Futures session the discussion turned to the role of technology in making markets safer. It was one of those great sessions where I turned up to moderate armed with a bunch of themes and questions following (ahem) “extensive research” and got to ask one of them!
Automation is important in markets, it brings valuable efficiencies and helps the financial markets industry advance – it’s what keeps us moving forward. It is not, however, the be all and end all, and while the FX spot market largely exists in an automated environment, firms should not be fooled into thinking they don’t need well-qualified and astute humans in key roles – one of them spot trading – for the latter role in particular, provides a crucial sanity check.
