Kenan Maciel pointed out to me that it is “option 3” in his article for the FiX that best describes the EU rules on OTC derivatives that were released on Wednesday – that of reporting trades to repositories and central clearing for standardized derivatives.

Having been away for a few weeks I’m still striving to get some sort of understanding of what’s going on; actually, it’s nothing to do with my absence, I’ve been vainly trying to understand markets for the past 30 years.

With my virtual money firmly on Trevor “I’ve been in the markets for 30 years” Carr to bring home the “luxury” prize from 7city’s simulation trading competition for journalists, I sat beside him at our virtual trading desk chomping on a free sarnie, confident the glory would be ours.

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There will continue to be fallout from the CFTC’s new regulations for retail FX but the big players are taking the regulations in good grace and, I imagine, some relief that the mooted curtailment of leverage to 10:1 was not imposed.

We hear that a rejig by BNP in Singapore has led to a couple of old acquaintances moving into prime positions. Paul Fraser has been promoted to head of investor sales, Asia, and, reporting to him, Arthur Baker (once at Société Générale in London), is now head of institutional investor FX in Asia.

Kieran Salter has left Calyon, where he had risen to global head of sales. He joined Calyon in 2004 from National Australia Bank as a senior hedge fund sales person. Rumour is that he is off to another Australian bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia this time, as head of multi-product European sales.

Citi has further strengthened its London EM desk with the hiring of David Madaras as an Asian FX trader. Madaras will quote IDR/MYR/PHP NDFs and spot HKD/SGD and joins from Barclays New York. He reports to James Bindler, head of CEEMEA trading and global head of FX options.

MG Financial will transfer its 4,000 FX customers to FOREX.com, the retail division of GAIN Capital in an agreement reached this week. MG has been offering online trading services since 1997 but has decided to exit the retail FX industry and cease operations.

Hotspot FX and CME followed the low volume August trend (Low volume August).

Market satisfaction with renewed US quantitative easing moves is as misguided as the Fed strategy itself. QE2’s perversions herald great pain farther down the road.

Gary Gensler is on a mission to make the CFTC the world’s most influential financial markets regulator. He wields an unprecedented mandate to interpret the statute book and thereby shape the future of banking. But his former colleagues in the banking industry claim his quest for power is based on personal ambition, causing him to ride roughshod over their reasonable opinions and creating a template that will bring unnecessary hardship to the financial industry and the broader economy. Hamish Risk interviewed the man many bankers call the “most dangerous man in finance”.

Lab49 is a consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and advanced technology solutions for the financial services industry. Kenan Maciel is a director in the Lab49 strategy group. In this guest post he surveys the possible regulatory outcomes for FX derivatives and the potential impact on FX trading from the banks’ perspective.

Spot trading has risen 50% in past three years; Non-bank participation increases

China is increasingly exposing its currency to the wider world but free convertibility still looks a long way off.

Volumes reported for August were down to their lowest levels of the year. If the cause is summer doldrums, we should see some pick up in September. The figures (Icap/EBS up only 4% year on year, Thomson Reuters up only 7%) are somewhat disappointing compared with the first half of the year, but the market has become more range-bound since the plunge in EUR/USD abated.

"The government [should] encourage greater trade in exchange-traded in comparison to OTC derivatives.”

Deutsche Bank announced the launch of its Automated Tool for Orders Management (Atom) enhancement for Autobahn last week. Coupled with a change in Deutsche’s terms of trading whereby the bank commits to deal on its streamed option prices (except in cases of the most manifest error) without re-quote, it looks like competitiveness in electronic options trading is entering a new phase.

Better take your air guitar to New York on October 21. The seventh Hedge Fund Rocktoberfest is a gathering of hedge fund and finance folk playing rock and acoustic sets for a children’s medical charity. I don’t know whether it will be more like Glastonbury or the X-factor, but it sounds a hoot. Sponsor from afar, drop in if you’re over there, or get together with some mates and play a set yourselves.

Standard Chartered has announced several new senior FICC appointments over the past week.

It seems the Bank of Japan has been carrying out dry runs and mock drills for eventual intervention.

David Hong joined Morgan Stanley at the end of August as head of FX and emerging markets trading for Asia, responsible for G10 FX and all emerging markets currency and rates trading in the region. He is based in Hong Kong.

The trajectory of the Australian dollar is very much on the FX market’s mind of late, writes John J. Hardy, consulting FX strategist at Saxo Bank. Within the major currencies AUD seems to serve as a kind of handy universal proxy for global risk appetite – an instrument that you can buy on hope and sell on fear. Since the recovery from the early 2009 nadir in global market sentiment, the Australian dollar has rallied versus most world currencies, with mostly minor setbacks, save perhaps for the one significant adjustment during the crazy global equity market correction early this summer.

Forex Capital Markets, one of the world’s largest retail platforms, announced today that it has “filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its class A common stock.”

Citigroup has named Todd Elmer head of G10 fx strategy for the Asia Pacific region.

FxPro is planning to list on the Alternative Investment Market in October

Predictably, the majority of comment on the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) survey led with the largely meaningless aggregate turnover figure, a measure that is about as useful a gauge of FX market development as VaR is as a tool for the management of an exotic options book.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced the final regulations on off-exchange retail foreign currency transactions.

FXPro today announced that Michael Sarris, the former government finance minister for Cyprus, has been appointed as non-executive director.

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