360T Podcast Series

Once again, Colin Lambert, Co-Founder of The Full FX, joins the podcast to make a series of predictions for the year ahead. But first we review and, for the first time ever, score his predictions from 2024 – has Lambert been looking into a crystal ball or a snow globe? Looking ahead to 2025, Lambert predicts that volatility will drive trading volumes up significantly across the industry, that regulators in the UK and Europe will get serious about enforcing rules for trading platforms and that the latest wave of non-bank market makers to enter the FX will find it a challenging marketplace. He also makes the case that FX options trading activity will continue shifting towards electronic trading platforms, sees currency CTAs heading for a banner year and suspects that debates around pre-hedging will rumble on with no real conclusion in sight. And, of course, Lambert picks out his infamous Trade of the Year!

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.