360T Podcast Series 360 Trading Networks

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 worlds
FX 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.