The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has released its triennial survey into “Foreign exchange and derivatives market activity”. The last survey was back in April 2007 when the credit crisis was making barely a ripple, so any comparison between those halcyon days and the jaundiced ones of April 2010 has to be interesting.

Choosing the right web applications and plug-in technology for your needs is crucial, especially if you are planning for the long term. Here are some thoughts on the available options.

One is a Russian with a PhD who reads 2,000-page books on programming in his spare time, the other is a pragmatic American and former Currenex managing director. Together, Andrey Vedikhin, Alpari UK’s chief executive officer, and Daniel Skowronski, global chief commercial officer, have hatched an ambitious plan for growth.

Derivatives Week

IBFX Holdings, parent company of US broker Interbank FX, has announced that they are opening an Australian subsidiary in Sydney.

Lloyds TSB has appointed Sara Yates as sector economist reporting to Hann-Ju Ho, senior sector economist.

Citigroup has appointed Patrick Perret-Green as head of FX and local markets strategy for Asia ex-Japan.

Sometimes it’s not always obvious what is moving a market. But here’s one reason being suggested for the recent move in USDSEK, which took down to a low of 7.0530 in early August.

It's not like us to beg for friends. We have plenty in real life, honest. It's just that our new LinkedIn page is looking more devoid of human life than Lehman Brothers on bankruptcy day.

Tim Carrington has been playing a game of high-quality musical chairs for the last few years.

HSBC has been busy expanding its global FX team in the Asia-Pacific region with five new hires.

Saxo bank released its interim results this week. The bank may have had a troubling six months in its relationship with the Danish FSA (FX comment: Was regulator pressured to act on Saxo by press reports?) but the business itself is booming.

One might have felt that some of the fines recently dished out by the UK’s FSA (FSA slaps JP Morgan with biggest fine ever, UBS fined for dodgy dealing) were on the harsh side but they were nothing more than a clips round the ear compared with this week’s judgement meted out to Barclays by US authorities (Federal Reserve Board press release, Department of Justice press release). Barclays has to stump up a total of $298 million, split 50/50 between “the United States and to the New York County District Attorney’s Office”

Upon the announcement that Chinese authorities were opening up the mainland bond market we speculated that the position of offshore centres could be undermined. But centres such as Hong Kong will continue to expand RMB business. With the mainland bond market being dominated by central bank bills, government and financial institution bonds, perhaps the way forward for Hong Kong is international corporate issuance.

Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the central bank, announced yesterday evening that it has ‘liberalised’ the rules on FX transactions to improve international business links.

We believe the fears of a double dip to be exaggerated, which makes bond markets vulnerable to likely yield rises. China takes a new step toward RMB internationalization.

The People’s Bank of China has today launched a pilot scheme to open up the Mainland interbank bond market to international trade, to promote the use of the Renminbi (CNY).

Hotspot’s July volumes saw average daily volumes (double counted) of $33.0 billion, but which was 11.3% lower than experienced in June at $37.2 billion.

Jane Foley has joined Rabobank as senior FX strategist. She will start at Rabo in London on August 31 and will report to Jan Lambregts, global head of financial markets research.

CLS have announced that Richard Kerschner, formally of the New York Mercantile Exchange, has been appointed as head of strategic initiatives.

Lloyds TSB has appointed Yuri Polyakov as its new head of risk solutions, reporting to Patrick Shone, head of structuring.

Ahead of the official announcement on Monday, FXall has told us that it has appointed Quito Zuba as senior director, global head of trade support.

The Singapore Mercantile Exchange (SMX) has been granted “approved exchanged” status by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, making it the first commodity and currency exchange in pan-Asia.

Old-school brokers GFI Fenics have promoted Julian Cook to head of quantitative research in New York.

Standard Chartered has appointed William Oswald (ex JPMorgan, London) to the newly created role of global head of fixed-income research.

Prudential Bache in New York has hired Joe Gelsomino (ex Natixis Bank) as a vice-president in FX sales. He will report to Brian Jaspers, global head of FX.

StreamBase has partnered with Alphastream, a Brazilian electronic trading solutions provider, to meet the growing demand for algorithmic trading technology.

CLS reported a decline of average daily volumes in July, settling $3.93 trillion and 16.6 million instructions averaging at 754,780 instructions a day. In June volumes were $4.23 trillion.

Of the interim results published in the second half of the week it was the Barclays Capital figures that impressed most. FICC income for the first half of 2010 was £4.948 billion. While this was a 40% decline relative to the more volatile first half of 2009, it is the only set of results that bears any sort of comparison with figures for the major US banks. For example, Goldman Sachs’s FICC revenue for the year to the end of June is $21.75 billion (£13.7 billion), compared with BarCap’s FICC revenue for the same period of £10.4 billion.

Deutsche Bank has launched two new currency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on their ETF platform db x-trackers, just days after the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) proposed new regulation for ETF trading.