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Headline results are now released.

THERE HAVE BEEN some significant winners and losers in this year’s Euromoney foreign exchange poll.

I did have to laugh this week. On the very same day we published the overall results of the Euromoney 2008 FX poll, market leviathan Deutsche Bank suffered an embarrassing problem with its Autobahn platform.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) published its Report of the Internal Working Group

The Parker FX Index has reported a 1.17% return for March. Of the 83 programs in the index, 53 reported positive results, 28 racked up losses and two were flat. On a risk-adjusted basis, the index was up 0.42%; the median return was 0.54% and performance ranged from a high of 13.97% to a low of –12.39%. Year-to-date, the index is up 2.28%.

Barclays Stockbrokers, a division of Barclays Wealth, has announced that its FX platform aimed at private investors has gone live following some extensive beta testing. The WeeklyFiX first reported Barclays’ plans last November. Since then the unit has conducted extensive market research to gauge the appetite for a margined FX service. It says that more than a quarter of investors (26%) surveyed are looking to trade FX in the future, with 16% already trading. The company, which claims to be the most active retail stockbroker in the UK, has declined to say how many clients it has; however, it is believed that the total is in excess of 400,000. Around 25% of these are deemed active, which suggests it has a lot of potential to attract some very significant flow.

You wait years for an investable FX index and two come along at once. Following hot on the heels of Barclays, Citi has announced the launch of its CitiFX Alpha portfolio of systematic trading strategies. The bank says these allow qualified investors to access FX and it has made four systematic trading strategies – G10 carry, emerging markets carry, trend following and economic factor model – available.

Sources say that Merrill Lynch has poached option traders Lee Cantor and Dave Katalan from Bank of America in New York.

Credit Suisse has promoted Steve Yanez as its global head of FX. As a result, Alain Delelis, Gordon Wallace, Simon Meadows and Ian Green, responsible for spot, derivatives, sales and e-trading, and distribution respectively, will now report to him. Yanez is a Credit Suisse veteran and previously headed up the bank’s short-term interest rate trading area.

Many active market participants have started to talk about how liquidity is drying up, although the latest set of figures from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ostensibly suggest everything is still rosy in the FX garden. CME reports that its FX volumes rose by 41% in April over the same month in 2007, averaging 613,000 contracts per day, equivalent to a nominal $88 billion of turnover.

Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking has appointed Pascale Moreau and Albert Loo as global heads of interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives activity. The two become members of the bank’s capital raising and financing executive committee and replace Ines de Dinechin, who is now responsible for structured products worldwide. Moreau joined SocGen in 1998, having started her career 1994 in the Caisse des dépots et Consignations as market maker on FRF, DEM and ECU interest rate derivatives and then as a proprietary trader on G7 IR and FX underlyings. Loo started back in 1991 as part of the bank’s IT team in charge of asset management accounting projects.

FX debate: Testing times in the search for alpha