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I called a company called Global Trader Europe (GTE) on Thursday, as I’d heard a rumour that it was in a spot of bother and had closed for new business.

My old mucker David Byne has left the option pricing specialist SuperDerivatives for a new role at Credit Suisse in AES FX sales. The bank says his hire is representative of its push to roll out its highly regarded advanced execution strategies (AES), or algos as they are known, across asset classes. Byne’s departure from SuperDerivatives is amicable, although no doubt the company will miss him. He is due to start at Credit Suisse in mid-March and will report to Jonathan Wykes.

I frequently tell my children that if they can’t say anything nice, they shouldn’t say anything at all. It’s a principle I’ve been trying to adhere to all week, ever since I started getting phone calls asking me if I had seen that FXMarketSpace, the spawn of Reuters and the CME, had announced that it was no longer going to publish its volumes.

These are interesting times for the CME. I have followed the performance of the company’s shares ever since they were listed at what now looks like the unbelievable bargain price of $35 back in December 2002. The shares recently peaked at just over $700, but they have fallen back and are trading around $535. One of the factors behind the recent fall is the news that the US Department of Justice has called for the break up of the CME’s vertical silo. The exchange also owns its clearing house, which the Department of Justice feels stifles competition.

It appears that there is a shortage of e-commerce sales people, both in FX and other assets. This should be taken as a reflection of how healthy the underlying market is – good news for all those involved in it.

When news broke that Harry Culham had left Merrill Lynch, a reader asked: “How on earth are they ever going to hire any serious FX personnel after doing this again?”

My thanks to the reader who sent me a link to an article published in London’s free newspaper CityAM.

Steve Braithwaite, Steve Bellamy, Matt Strand

People moves: More FX turmoil at Merrill Lynch

Word reaches me that one of my old bosses, Rob Jacques, is making a comeback after having retired a couple of years ago to Germany. He is about to start at Nylon Capital, the hedge fund set up by former Barclays big wig Alan Burnell.

The International Securities Exchange is planning to list options on exchange-traded fund shares invested in securities, gold and cash. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently allowed the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange to start trading two gold ETFs, the streetTRACKS Gold Shares and the iShares COMEX Gold Trust Shares, respectively. The ISE, along with rival Chicago Board Options Exchange, have long eyed commodity pool ETFs in order to get more leverage in the burgeoning energy and gold markets (WSL, 3/20). The SEC has relaxed rules for commodity pool ETFs, deeming them to be securities rather than commodities and therefore allowing options exchanges to trade them.

The signs are that, while talking reassurance, the US authorities are really moving towards damage limitation. What the Buffett intervention really implies is that monoline insurers can go hang.