October 2010

Spooking the Market

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Having recently attended the launch in London of John le Carré’s new book, Our Kind of Traitor, it got me thinking, naturally enough, about money laundering, international espionage and dirty tricks! Now in his late seventies, le Carré has written an intensely contemporary thriller with a fascinating central tenet that we (in the West) have “ignored something that has been going on for some time: the extraordinary amount of ‘black money’ washing around in the system and its potential effects, both economically and politically.”

So, with Pussy Galore to hand, I donned my trench coat and trilby and set off to get the low down on the darker side of the markets… where it’s a case of being stirred, not shaken!

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Tagged with: Bob Johnson, Christina Weisz, CIBC, Currency Solutions, FxPro, GFT, Jeremy Stretch, John le Carré, Kathy Lien, Mark Bolsom, Morningstar, Simon Denham, Simon Smith

Understanding forex risk management: this is now!

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Selwyn Gishen is a trader with more than 15 years of experience trading forex and equities for a private equity fund. For the past 35 years, he has also been a student of metaphysics, and has written a book called “Mind: How Changing Your Mind Can Change Your Life!” (2007). Gishen is the founder of FXNewsandViews.Com and the author of a forex trading guide entitled “Trading the Forex Markets: A Foundation Course for Online Traders.”

Trading is the exchange of goods or services between two or more parties. So if you need gasoline for your car, then you would trade your dollars for gasoline. In the old days, and still in some societies, trading was done by barter, where one commodity was swapped for another.

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Tagged with: Selwyn Gishen, Trading

The Third Way

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

In the second of three articles examining next generation trading techniques, Frances Maguire outlines the differences between Mirror trading and automated trading.

In recent years, the foreign currency exchange market has become an extremely popular speculative opportunity, with the numbers of retail brokerage clients and self-directed traders growing rapidly. Many traders getting involved in the Forex market are looking for assistance from experienced traders that have developed strategies to help them get started. Mirror trading enables traders to simply mirror the methods of successful traders in their own forex investments.

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Tagged with: Trading

Barclays Corporate Gears Up for New Growth

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Colin Nutt, Vice Chairman, Barclays Corporate and Head of Financial Institutions, talks to Frances Maguire about the key trends in payments, trade and liquidity and where Barclays Corporate is positioning itself at Sibos in Amsterdam.

Colin Nutt believes that Sibos is, and will remain, the single most important week of year. As a result, Barclays Corporate will make more staff available this year than ever before at the conference, from product management and sales areas to senior hires made over the past 12 months targeting between 250-300 client meetings during the conference.

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Tagged with: Barclays Corporate, Colin Nutt, Cover Interviews

Transaction banking – a year on

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Last year’s Sibos in Hong Kong, themed Extending Critical Dialogue During Critical Times, proved to be the biggest ever Sibos held in Asia and focused on how the industry could collaborate and cooperate, both with each other in terms of shared infrastructure, and with the regulators in terms of rebuilding and learning from the lessons learnt.

On the theme of collaboration and ‘co-opetition’, the world’s largest transaction banks acknowledged that although they are arch competitors in some areas, they are ready to collaborate on areas like shared infrastructure.

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Tagged with: Chris Dunne, Misys, Olivier Berthier, Transaction Banking, VocaLink

The essence of SEPA

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Sibos participants eagerly await publication of regulation mandating end dates, and outlining ‘essential requirements’, from the European Commission but will it be enough to make SEPA a reality?

There is no doubt that when SEPA is finally in place it will transform the business of cash management and greatly impact the banking industry. The establishment of a truly integrated European payments landscape, where euro transactions are subject to a uniform set of standards and rules and conditions, has taken an unprecedented level of co-operation from the banks to achieve.

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Tagged with: Deutsche Bank, Karoline von Richthofen, Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)

Margining on the Future

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / FX-MM

Sibos participants will be asked to take a long, hard look at the future of payments and where revenue will come from.

The loss of cross-border revenues in Europe coupled with the investment needed to become SEPA compliant has both made payments a scale-game as well as prompting banks to look at how they can add value to payment services by offering faster and more efficient premium services by developing einvoicing and mobile payments capabilities. These issues will be discussed across three sessions at Sibos this year.

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Tagged with: Christian Westerhaus, Equens, Jerry Norton, Logica, Michael Steinbach, Payments

Getting to Grips with Reference Data

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / David Penney, EVP Startegy and Product Management, SmartStream

Managing reference data is often called a ‘conundrum’ for good reason. Despite firms throwing considerable resources at the problem, significant issues persist and it’s clear that something is fundamentally flawed.

Quite simply there’s so much data to manage, data that evolves over its lifetime and takes on a life of its own, and no one can be entirely sure whether it’s accurate. That situation is common at an average sized investment bank – multiply that issue across a global infrastructure at one firm and then across the industry as a whole and the size of the problem becomes all too apparent.

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Tagged with: David Penney, SmartStream

The Jewels of Holland

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / Drew Hillier, Editor

As the financial services industry gears up for Sibos in Amsterdam, FX&MM delves into the land of Delft, clogs, waterways and windmills to discover there’s more to the Netherlands than meets the eye. Just as Sibos is more than a conference and exhibition, so too is this year’s host city more than merely an eye-catching collection of museums and quaint bridges. The capital of the world’s 16th largest economy – an internationally renowned powerhouse of industry, global jurisprudence, commerce and shipping – Amsterdam is an amply appropriate destination for this year’s premier event for the financial services industry, taking place from 25 – 29 October, where – like Holland itself – networking and doing business top the agenda. Drew Hillier reports.

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Tagged with: Lázaro Campos, Nout Wellink, Regional Focus, Stephen Cecchetti, SWIFT

Basel III Liquidity Reform Package

October 2010 / 20 October 2010 / Nancy Masschelein, Head of Risk and Capital Management. FinArch

FinArch is a market leader in integrated Risk and Finance solutions. Here, the firm’s Head of Risk and Capital Management, Nancy Masschelein, address your questions.

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Tagged with: FinArch, Liquidity Risk, Nancy Masschelein