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June/July 2010
14 July 2010
"Saigon... s**t! I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle." These are the now infamous first lines uttered by Captain Benjamin L. Willard - the main character played by Martin Sheen in the seminal Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now. With the markets currently bunkered down against the distinct whiff of contagion spreading across the EU battlefield and beyond, there will doubtless be many traders heading for their holidays paraphrasing those apocalyptic words!
14 July 2010
Fresh from his country having enjoyed a successful G20 Summit in Toronto, China's President Hu Jintao has been invited by his American counterpart to make a state visit to the United States. This new-found cordiality, spearheaded by the Obama administration, has been boosted by the Hu government's recent decision to relax controls on its currency. On June 21, China celebrated the summer solstice by making the peg temporarily less rigid, causing the largest one-day appreciation in its currency against the dollar since 2008. Yet as Drew Hillier reports, the Hu government's latest move does not in itself signal a policy shift, rather a resumption of a strategy initiated in 2005, rethought in 2008 and suspended in 2009. Which begs the question as to whether there's more to all this than meets the eye?
14 July 2010
It's not very often, if indeed ever, that a retail FX and CFD broker becomes a household name. That is, up till now. With its moniker emblazoned not merely across the gleaming paintwork of Richard Branson's Virgin F1 Grand Prix cars, but also adorning the shirts of a couple of English Premier League teams, throw in sponsorship of the World Rally Championships and it's clear to see FxPro is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.
14 July 2010
There has been a steady growth in the use of electronic trading platforms by corporates and financial institutions to trade FX over the past 10 years. According to Greenwich Associates' latest survey, global foreign exchange markets continued their migration to electronic execution, overtaking voice trading, over the last year, as e-trading volumes increased amid a decline in overall FX trading activity.
14 July 2010
Electronic FX trading first emerged in the late 1990s but internet functionality wasn't yet ready to cope with it on a large scale. The real growth has come since 2002-2003 and the banks that were able to offer services then really had a first mover advantage.
The drive towards eFX trading has come from both sides - clients and platform providers. Customers like the speed, convenience and low error rates of automated trading, the price transparency, the ability to obtain multiple quotes and that it allows high-frequency trading.
14 July 2010
Volatility has been a talking point in the last month, encouraging more interest in FX Options. Online investment and trading specialist Saxo Bank has seen its FX Options volume rise by 60% making FX Options an integral part of the traders overall FX portfolio. Michael Schmeja, Global Head of Derivatives Sales at Saxo Bank talks about why and how Saxo Bank is supporting its FX Options traders.
14 July 2010
SEB is the leading foreign exchange bank in the Nordic/ Baltic regions and invests significantly and continuously in specialist expertise and new systems. David Steiner, head of global e-FX, at SEB talks to FX&MM about how SEB is taking a holistic approach for faster and better FX risk management.
FX&MM: As one of the earliest e-FX providers to market it is no surprise that you experienced a shift from voice to electronic trading. When did e-trading finally overtake voice trading?
14 July 2010
Solidifying Client Relationships with Technology
When UBS Global Head of FICC e-Commerce Simon Wilson-Taylor-one of the first innovators in electronic trading-discusses the latest news in FX, he draws on 35 years of both buy-side and sell-side experience in financial services. In September 2009 he joined UBS to lead the firm's most recent initiative to deliver FX and fixed income services to clients through all electronic channels. Wilson-Taylor brings to this initiative the one major lesson he has learned during his fifteen years in e-commerce: Technology may change, but commitment to the client doesn't.
14 July 2010
Companies now have a viable solution to the problems presented by the internationalisation of their businesses and the resultant multiple bank connectivity requirements, that gives them a genuine opportunity to leverage the same solution that banks have been using for years and realise comparable benefits across their multiple banking relationships.
Swift has been in the corporate space for some years, initially with TRCO (Treasury Counterparty), followed by the MACUG, closed user group model, and then in 2007, Swift introduced the SCORE model - Standard Corporate Environment.
14 July 2010
Where once the mighty dot-com boom walked, hurtling past Silicone Valley in the footmarks of the Great Geek-in-Chief, Bill Gates, now marches green tech. Sustainable Design... Wind Power... Solar Energy... Wave Harnessing... Rare Earth... Carbon Capture... Eco-friendly this, Energy-saving that; we've all seen and heard examples of the ways in which technology is used to advance the "green" movement. But what, really, is it all about? And, more importantly, how can we make money from it! Drew Hillier searches for his very own low-energy light bulb moment.
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