Our 50th episode features Mark Mulholland from Fidelity International discussing his recent deep-dive analysis on FX trade rejections, and their impact on execution quality and outcomes. Despite the topic of last look grabbing industry headlines in recent years, Mulholland explains that other often overlooked issues — such as static data — proved to be a bigger driver of reject rates for his firm and highlights the challenges posed by a lack of data standarisation across the FX industry. He also outlines how his analysis has helped Fidelity International realise a significant drop in the number of FX trade reject rates and points to an opportunity for sell-side firms to provide better pricing to clients and, ultimately, improve market efficiency. 

Marc Chandler, Chief Market Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex, breaks down some of the key themes and trends impacting the FX market. He discusses the fallout of the recent unwinding of the yen carry trade on corporations, explains why currency markets don't always follow a pattern of cause-and-effect and argues that the US dollar will remain at the centre of financial markets - but not necessarily for the reasons that many people assume. Chandler also looks ahead to a potential rate cut by the US Federal Reserve Bank and a divisive presidential election, making the case that the dollar is set for a cyclical downturn.

In this episode Nathan Vurgest, Director of Trading at Record Financial Group, talks in-depth about how data is changing and shaping FX trading desks. He outlines the challenges facing buy-side firms as they try to access and make sense of all the trade data which they generate internally, explains how traders are evolving to provide more value beyond just FX execution and highlights that this broadening role introduces new complexities around effectively measuring best execution.

As is something of a tradition on the 360T podcast now, Colin Lambert, Co-Founder of The Full FX, joins as a guest to review the accuracy of his 2023 predictions and make a series of new ones for the year ahead. Lambert receives some gentle criticism for making "obvious" predictions last year, which perhaps prompted him to be more daring this year as his 2024 predictions encompass cybersecurity threats, why the shift to T+1 settlement might only be the tip of the iceberg, flash crashes in the FX market, a good year for discretionary trading, cryptocurrency adoptions and more! And although Lambert concedes he is in danger of becoming a reverse indicator with his infamous Trade of the Year, he nevertheless makes his pick for 2024.

This episode features two experts, Tobias Rank from Eurex and David Holcome from 360T, taking a deep dive into why more FX market participants are turning towards Exchange for Physical (EFP) products, and how the listed FX marketplace is likely to evolve in the future. The pair also tackle questions about how regulations are changing the economics of OTC trading, whether there is really a demand to support more listed FX trading and the shortcomings of OTC FX clearing.Additional resources about EFPs:FX EFPs – the best of two worldsFX EFP tutorial – mechanics and use cases

FX is a highly liquid market, with many different currencies to trade that are constantly moving against one another, so why don’t investors typically think about this asset class when building out their portfolios? In this episode Van Luu, Global Head of Solutions Strategy, Fixed Income and FX at Russell Investments, addresses this question and explains the important role that currency strategies can play in helping investors to diversify a multi-asset portfolio. In particular, he talks about how a currency strategy which leverages three factors — Carry, Value and Trend — can offer low (or even negative) correlation to traditional assets, providing a boost to multi-asset portfolios while generating little or no additional risk.

The FX Global Code of Conduct has been a major and ongoing industry initiative since 2015, but it's been well documented that buy-side adoption of the Code has lagged behind other segments of the marketplace.  In this episode Dagmara Fijalkowski, head of global fixed income and currencies at RBC GAM, talks about why buy-side adoption of the Code has been slow thus far, what possible steps could be taken to accelerate it and how the Code has brought tangible benefits to both RBC GAM specifically, and the FX industry more broadly.

While the consequences of geopolitical events are felt in the currency markets first, in the long-term it is fundamentals that continue to drive this asset class, says Adrian Lee, the President and CIO of Adrian Lee & Partners, in this episode. He discusses emerging trends across both, as well as identifying the fault lines in the global economy where we might see the next big risk factors emerge from. Lee also discusses how and why investor attitudes towards currency management are changing, helps to get beyond some of the jargon surrounding these services and makes the case for active over passive currency management.

How is artificial intelligence (AI) likely to change the way that financial products, including FX, are traded? This is the key question addressed by Saeed Amen, co-founder of Turnleaf Analytics, in the wake of the recent hype around this technology sparked by new tools such as ChatGTP. Amen outlines some of his own experiments with AI chatbots, discusses the importance of having access to high quality data in order to train AI models and helps to parse through some of the terminology and misconceptions surrounding this technology. He also addresses how AI will change the role of the human trader, predicting that the curation of trading activity and then providing a narrative around this will become increasingly important.

Colin Lambert, Co-Founder of the Full FX, joins 360T to review his 2022 predictions and is surprised to find that while he achieved mixed scores on the forecasts he claimed were “certain” to happen, his “wildcard” ones fared much better. Perhaps this is a sign of what an unpredictable year it was? Looking ahead, Lambert picks out the key themes which he thinks will define the FX industry in 2023 and once again makes a series of predictions for the year ahead. And finally, completely undaunted by the poor results of previous years, he once again announces his Trade of the Year.

The upcoming US presidential election could prove to be a crucial fork in the road when it comes to financial regulation, explains Justin Slaughter, a partner at Mercury Strategies. In this episode he talks about the potential for the politicisation of US regulatory agencies, the extent to which international cooperation on financial rules could be jeopardized and whether or not geopolitical conflicts around trade and technology could be replicated within financial markets. 

This episode opens with MacGillivray talking about her firm’s technology stack for multi-asset dealing, explaining that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution and, therefore, the desk has instead built out a “best-of-breed” model which deploys asset class specific technology to ensure the best execution outcomes. MacGillivray also highlights areas where she sees existing technology being adapted to fit different asset classes, talks about the importance of reducing manual risk from the trading desk and discusses how attitudes towards handling FX exposures are slowly changing amongst the investment management community. The episode ends with MacGillivray expressing optimism that the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic could lead to greater diversity within the financial services industry, reducing the existing culture of presenteeism that she says exists today. 

In this episode Christopher Cruden, CEO and Director of the hedge fund Insch Kintore Ltd., reflects on how the FX markets have changed since he launched his first currency trading programme back in 1991 and explains how he has adapted his trading strategy accordingly. Cruden also tackles the question of why trend following strategies have generally yielded poor returns over the past decade and whether or not there is actually such a thing as “sweet spot volatility” when it comes to FX.