e-Forex

In April 1956, a converted tanker called the Ideal-X left Newark for Houston carrying fifty-eight trailer bodies on its specially fitted deck. Nothing about the cargo got simpler. What Malcolm McLean changed was the interface between the contents and everything that had to move them — not the contents. As Marc Levinson’s The Box (2006) tells it, conventional break-bulk shipping could leave vessels in port for days while cargo was loaded piece by piece, at enormous handling cost.

Foreign exchange (FX) occupies a unique place alongside other members of the big four asset classes. It is much less likely to be traded for alpha generation than equity, credit or rates. Instead, many approach the market as a mechanism for access, as investors and proprietary trading firms use it to rotate into non-domestic markets. As such, the FX function has often sat separately from other trading desks.

By Jon Light, Senior Director of Product Management at Devexperts Liquidity bridges are, arguably, the most important and overlooked pieces of FX brokerage infrastructure. This may be partly due to how they originally emerged as relatively simple middleware between legacy trading platforms and liquidity providers.

Northern Trust has announced that it has entered into an agreement with Lukka to deliver an institutional-grade digital asset reporting capability, expanding Northern Trust’s service offering to include enhanced access to digital asset data. Lukka provides institutional-grade digital asset data infrastructure, software, and analytics designed to help organizations ingest, normalize, reconcile, and report on complex on- and off-chain activity.

JT Markets has announced the launch of the Trader Profile Index (TPI), a proprietary flow-scoring system designed to give brokers a clear, data-driven answer to one of the industry’s oldest questions: which clients should be warehoused, and which should be hedged.

Paul Golden investigates why the value of harnessing FX options data for better trading decisions is becoming ever more evident as market participants chase valuable insights. FX options data is valuable because it reveals what market participants expect and how they are positioning for future currency moves, rather than simply showing what has already happened in the spot market.

Digital assets trading remains operationally complex for institutional market participants despite rapid advances in technology and market infrastructure. According to Chris Knight, managing director, LMAX Digital, the infrastructure has advanced only in silos rather than holistically. Consequently, the market structure is below the expectations of most institutional participants.

From tackling settlement risk in underserved currencies to strengthening FX Prime Brokerage workflows, and helping institutions optimise capital and margin, OSTTRA is expanding the role it plays at the heart of the global FX market. Keith Tippell, Head of FX at the firm, brings over two decades of capital markets leadership and post-trade fintech expertise to his new role.

Finteum addresses a critical pain point for banks which revolves around the friction, operational and opportunity costs and inefficiencies inherent in managing intraday liquidity. We asked the firms CEO, Brian Nolan, to tell us more about how it has gone about addressing this issue. The idle liquidity that Finteum focuses on specifically is only idle for a few hours. It is intraday liquidity, which institutions have not had the opportunity to generate any return on, until now.

NAGA has integrated iSAM Securities’ Radar and Apex solutions, adding real-time risk analytics and low-latency execution technology to support its next phase of growth. With Radar, NAGA has access to a powerful risk analytics platform designed to improve understanding of client activity, exposure, profitability and trading behaviour. Through a detailed view of book performance, risk and dealing teams can identify trading patterns earlier and make more data-driven decisions.