As well as the obvious areas around liquidity and spreads, the pandemic appears, if the anecdotal evidence of many of my recent conversations is anything to go by, to have reignited discussion around what constitutes best execution? I’ll be honest and say that I thought this subject was as settled as is it ever going […]
There’s a behavioural feel to this week’s podcast as Colin Lambert opens up with his views on the number of spoofers being brought to heel by the CFTC. He then moves onto another CFTC-related issue, wondering if questions should be asked of the management team that allowed Citi’s voice monitoring operation to descend into apparent […]
Financial markets data science firm, FairXchange has added a new pricing stack analysis feature to its Horizon platform, a move the firm claims is “game changing’ by enabling financial institutions to make more informed, data driven decisions about how they interact with existing and prospective liquidity providers. By providing a complete view of a financial institution’s […]
Another week, another move by a player in the FX CLOB space, this time from a primary venue in EBS. Albeit the actual changeover is still 18 months away, but what are we to make of the new matching model at what remains one of the platforms of record in spot FX? Probably the biggest […]
Something I get asked quite frequently is why I have such a dislike of last look, after all during my trading career it barely existed and anyone who did regularly “drop” others (that’s reject in modern day idiom) soon got a reputation they didn’t want (or the threat of a visit from some very “tasty […]
Thursday’s column on what constitutes “institutional” and what exactly is an LP got people fired up, but before that I need to reiterate that my praise in that column for those doing good in the industry was not limited to the two Hall of Famers I mentioned. Although we do run the HoF and naturally […]
Nearly all liquidity is, to a degree, recycled, and always has been – a market cannot start without someone either posting interest or (often metaphorically) stating, “this is my price”. I get that, and my frequent and overwhelmingly negative comments on this recycling aspect of the FX market do take that into account – but […]
A widespread misconception has taken hold in FX, that retail flow is easy to price or, as it is commonly referred to, “soft”. At a very basic level, the logic behind such an assumption generally runs as follows: retail traders represent uninformed flow and the vast majority of them lose money, therefore it must be […]
Those of you who stayed with me to the end on Thursday’s column would have seen the teaser over why I think this is not the time to be buying an FX platform – so here is my thinking, and it’s pretty bleak. I have been asked in the past why I have such a […]
The Global FX Committee is to soon embark on its first three year review of the FX Global Code and this represents a great opportunity to clarify – and hopefully eradicate – what I still believe to be the biggest legal risk facing the FX industry. Whereas I think prudent tweaks to the Code and […]