It’s good to see Alpari are business as usual after our report of the firm’s embarrassing FSA investigation earlier this month.

The weeklyFiX is putting it down to coincidence that HotSpot forgot to send us their volumes last Friday after our revelations about double-count-gate, but luckily we got sent them by someone else.

On Tuesday, nearly two weeks after the unprecedented stock market sell-off and rebound, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) published their Preliminary findings regarding the market events of May 6, 2010. At 151 pages you can see why it has taken so long; the SEC says it has “sourced and analyzed price, time, and volume data on over 19 billion shares executed on May 6, and quote data representing the best bid and best offer for over 7,800 securities, for each exchange, for each millisecond during the trading day.”

After EUR/CHF had been driven back to 1.4300 on Wednesday, one observer on Zero Hedge expressed the opinion that “the SNB is a clumsy source of systemic risk in Europe. Their actions in the days preceding the flash crash along with their actions on the day of the crash made them a significant factor in the crash.” I’ve been occasionally been critical of the way the SNB intervenes but even I thought that a bit excessive.

Swiss watch and bide their time

Breaking news this week: FX trading switches to electronic over phone, while increased electronic FX trading puts new demands on technology.

Rick Sears has been appointed chief operating officer for FX at Barclays Capital. He takes the seat of Sean Comer who left the clearer for Deutsche late last year.

Dan Hanson, a director in FX options at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is leaving, the firm has confirmed.

Nomura has promoted David Bizer, formerly global head of fixed income sales, to chief administrative officer to the wholesale division.

RBC has added two hires to its global FX team in the Asia-Pacific region, with the appointments of Winston Quek and Amanda Lowe.

Robbie Boukhoufane will be joining CIBC in August as a director in asset management sales in their London office.

Commerz declined to comment but market talk (and his own LinkedIn entry) would suggest that the bank has hired Roland White as head of eFX sales in London. White left Standard Chartered, where he was a director in eFX sales, at the end of last year and since then has done some consultancy, most notable with nascent FX networking venue LetstalkFX.

Cable moved back up to 1.50 during the early part of the week but that hardly qualifies as a rally. The indications are that sterling is back in bear country.

Volumes have never been a particular favourite of mine, especially when they are presented in different formats, in percentage increases, in currencies other than USD. Even so, it came as something of a surprise this week when we were tipped off that Hotspot double count their volumes.

The Financial Services Authority have slapped Alpari with a £140,000 fine and its former money laundering reporting officer (MLRO), Sudipto Chattopadhyay with a fine of £14,000.

Sources say Andrew Bailey, an emerging markets FX options trader based in London, is leaving Bank of America Merrill.

Most FX players will have welcomed the last week’s volatility that meant a surge in platform volumes, but there have been rumours that several banks struggled to cope – and not just at the front end.

Citibank’s head of FX bank sales EMEA in London, Nick Downes, quit the bank last night.

Monday dawned with news of the dramatic measures announced by the EU and the ECB to stave off further debt-crisis contagion. EUR/USD rallied from a low of 1.2520 on Sunday evening to as high as 1.3093 early Monday before retracing by nearly 50% to 1.2820 by the afternoon; by Tuesday afternoon EUR/USD had drifted below 1.2700. The question is: “Where now?” The answer, with a couple of exceptions, is: “Lower.”

WDX has sub-licensed the ePulse Web Messenger product to go live with a Wocu Messenger application. “This application is specifically designed to help WDX grow the Wocu, the World Currency Unit community,” says Barry Patel, managing director of ePulse. “In addition to a functionally rich web-based instant messaging platform, we are also pleased to announce our first implementation of the WDX streaming prices adapter. This will provide the WDX community with streaming Wocu spot rates and cross rates as part of the Wocu messenger offering, allowing clients to carry out efficient pre-trade conversations and price discovery on an OTC basis. We also expect to add further order management plug-ins to provide powerful electronic order processing and news dissemination capabilities.”

A few weeks ago we reported Gus Rieunier’s departure from State Street and conjectured that Saxo had hired him. How right we were; the move was confirmed on Tuesday when Saxo announced Rieunier’s appointment as global head of FX options and forward trading, to be based in Copenhagen.

Creating opportunity out of crisis; Transaction cost measurement; Regulation and reducing risk; Algorithmic trading; Arbitrage trading; FX trading moves into the next generation

CME reported record days in FX options on Tuesday and Wednesday, transacting notionals of $25.0 billion and $26.1 billion respectively, single count. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of this was in EUR/USD options and around 60% of the trades were EUR puts.

Icap announced Wednesday that average daily volumes on its spot FX electronic platform EBS were $154.2 billion in April, a year-on-year increase of 27%.

FXall and ITG this week got together to introduce a new offering that quantifies and evaluates FX transaction costs.

It was another interesting session at Euromoney’s FX conference, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, when a mix of traders and strategists at Barclays Capital gave their five best trade ideas in the peripheral G10/EM currencies.

At the 10th annual Forex Forum this week, it seemed things were back to normal after the "crisis" - at least if the huge number of delegates in attendance and the generous array of freebies on offer were indications.

It was interesting to compare the recommendations of two Euromoney panel discussions on Wednesday, “Emerging Markets: Selecting the Winning Currencies” and “Themes and Forecasts for 2010/11 and the Reasons Behind the Forecasts”.

I’ve done a few dinners in my time - comments confirming this obvious statement of fact are not invited - but Wednesday evening was up there with the most enjoyable.

The Swiss National Bank continues to rewrite the central bank rulebook.