It’s been a strange week. Phone calls from my muckers suggest next to nothing has been going on in the wonderful world of the “$4 trillion a day FX Market”©. Yes, I know it’s barely a week since the Bank for International Settlements published its authoritative Triennial central bank survey, reporting daily activity of $3.2 trillion. As we all know, turnover has continued to expand since then, and I for one don’t want to use what might be out of date data for the next three years to refer to the market’s size; so I’m sticking with my guesstimate. In fact, I am copyrighting and in the process of buying a website for it.
Anyway, I thought I’d have to resort to writing a lifestyle column this week to make up for the fact that so little has happened. My week has been quite good. My daughter Katie came home from school on Tuesday, highly impressed that when she did a Google search on my name, she found me. This apparently impressed her friends, even though they had no idea what the weeklyFiX was going on about – much like my sub-editors really. (Careful! I wield a mighty red pen – Sub-ed.)
I also had to cancel lunch with one of the market’s grand frommages on Wednesday because it was my son Thomas’s 10th birthday. He also had a school football match and I wanted to see him play. And I’m glad I did, because not only did he score a goal, but he got what my Septic* friends would call three assists.
Still, as this week’s deadline loomed, I started to panic. Would I have to reveal the details of the dozen or so stories I’ve been asked to sit on? Could I legitimately reveal which two top-10 FX banks are poised to white-label retail platforms? Could I spill the beans on what appears to be the successful reinvention of a certain Zurich-based company as a risk management solution and its supposedly imminent deal with a certain high-profile retail platform?
It’s a tough call. My job is to report news. Sometimes, I take the decision that it’s better to hold back and get a better story, which also makes it less likely that I’ll spoil someone’s potentially well-planned product launch. But where do I draw the line? As a journalist, I know what the answer is: publish and be damned. But the pragmatist in me knows that any short-term gain can soon evaporate.
So, I’d love to be able to tell you about how one platform has just one client doing 50% to 75% of its business. However, I can’t, because the client called me a while back and offered to spill all the dirt on the FX industry, but only if I signed a non-disclosure agreement – a difficult way to give my readers the satisfaction they want.
