Rich Wenzel will join Molten Markets in a role where he will be responsible for ensuring “the fairness and efficiency of the trading environment”, which the company says is a step away from common industry practice. The role will be independent of the company’s sales division to ensure “impartiality and neutrality”, as Molten seeks to apply advanced quantitative analysis to the balancing of MoltenFX’s liquidity pools, the firm says in a statement.
In an interview with EuromoneyFXNews last month, Wilson-Taylor said Molten’s founding principle was to revamp the traditional model of electronic communication network (ECN) liquidity, by creating separate anonymous liquidity pools for different trading behaviours, and to develop more depth and stability of pricing.
Moreover, the Molten model would focus less on building up large numbers of liquidity providers, and more on improving the “integrity” of liquidity among a smaller group of key liquidity providers.
Wenzel joins from Bay Head CI, a New Jersey-based firm which provides trading and working capital for high-frequency algorithmic trading. He had been responsible for researching, developing and trading short-term trading models across multiple ECNs and single-dealer platforms.
Interestingly, another new entrant into the FX ECN market, FXSpotStream, which has launched in the US this summer, hired Bay Head’s chief executive Alan Schwarz to head up the company in December.
Molten has also hired Peter Frucht as FX product manager to oversee new FX product development alongside technology partner First Derivatives. He will help develop Molten’s product InstiFX, which targets real-money managers and aims to “meet the sophisticated pre-trade operational and analytical needs of fund managers when trading FX”. It plans to roll it out in the fourth quarter.
Frucht was most recently a senior business analyst and project manager in FX e-commerce at Citi. While there, he was involved in a number of key initiatives during a period of substantial change for the business, including CitiFX FIX API and CitiFX Velocity. He also, like the founders of Molten, is a former employee of State Street.