Thomson Reuters announced on Wednesday that BGC Partners, the interdealer broker, has expanded its post-trade offering of Thomson Reuters Trade Notification to include FX options.

EUR/CHF has been quiet of late. The SNB still appears to be protecting 1.46 but the question is for how much longer. There are a few strategists now advocating a short position in the pair.

I wasn’t going to write about the likelihood of a European Monetary Fund being created.

On Wednesday Tullett Prebon, made an announcement to the London Stock Exchange that it was “in preliminary talks with a third party which may or may not lead to an offer being made for the entire issued share capital of the company.”

JPMorgan appear to be beefing up their macro hedge fund sales. Tim Hall and Roddy Graham are joining JPM’s FX institutional sales to service European hedge funds. Hall comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Graham from RBS.

Mark Capleton and Valentin Marinov have joined Société Générale Cross Asset Research in London. Both will report to Vincent Chaigneau, head of fixed income and forex strategy.

Morgan Stanley announced this week that it has hired Martin Bradford, who was previously head of European FX prime brokerage sales at RBS.

Citi have hired Sebastian del Bano as head quant in the FX and local markets division. del Bano began his markets career at RBS, where he became head of FX and equity quantitative research. He moved to Nomura and then back to RBS, where he was involved in quantitative trading.

CLS Group announced on Monday that Rob Close, its CEO and president and CEO of CLS Bank International, will be retiring on June 30, after nine years with the company.

Paul Farrow, e-commerce FX sales at Deutsche Bank, has left the London office for the Dubai office.

More stories from Derivatives week

--Katy Burne

Derivatives Week

Gain Capital announced a partnership with Streambase Systems, the provider of complex event processing (CEP) technology. According to the press release the tie-up will “offer a complete solution for their mutual clients to quickly deploy FX high-frequency trading algorithms.”

Thomson Reuters continue to go from strength to strength as their volumes for February were released this week.

Forex Capital Markets (FXCM) announced the opening of its Athens branch, FXCM Hellas. Using FXCM’s Trading Station platform, clients will be able to access currencies, stock indices, gold, silver and oil.

Daewoo Securities in South Korea announced this week that it is now offering FX margin trading.

The senate regulatory bills continue to be formulated but it looks like the matter of clearing-house governance is now being looked at seriously.

The weeklyFiX was sad to hear of the death of the former leader of the UK’s old-style Labour Party, Michael Foot, on Wednesday. Possibly slightly less sad than us was Mark Comer, better known as Newt, who is a forward cable broker at Tullet Prebon.

The Parker FX index, made up of 62 foreign exchange funds, fell 0.30% in January. 26 funds reported a profit, 35 incurred losses and one was flat. The largest profit was 3.59%, the largest loss 4.26%.

Warren Buffett’s appearance on CNBC on Monday got plenty of people talking this week.

It was a strange week for sterling. Monday was touted as the first day of a full scale rout but today (Friday) sees cable not much lower than where it was at the end of last week. It looks like Monday might have been just the final blow-off of the 61.8% retracement of the 1.35-1.70 bounce. Price action from the base was chaotic, down two big figures and back up one in the space of 15 minutes.

Bob de Groot resigned from his position as head of Citibank’s London FX desk this week. He had been at Citi for 15 years, and had also worked in its Tokyo and New York offices. Such is de Groot’s popularity that, according to my sources, he was cheered off the floor. Initial speculation that de Groot was going to retire gave way to unconfirmed talk that he would soon reappear at BNP Paribas.

Unicredit has announced that Paola Zelante joined on March 1. Zelante is based in Milan covering FX sales to Italian financial institutions; she has extensive experience of the Italian market having previously worked at Barclays and Citibank, both in Milan. Locally, she will report to Francesco Gladulich, head of fixed income sales Italy, and globally to Steve Turner, head of FX sales.

Up till now Lloyds has supplied 24-hour spot FX cover from a London-based night desk.

Sean Rochford, ex RBS and Goldman Sachs, who is also a qualified engineer, joins HSBC as global head of FX operations from March 15.

Despite shaky state finances, the country’s banking system has so far avoided disaster, partly thanks to the caution of central bank governor Umayya Toukan. But can the kingdom remain a haven of stability? Dominic O’Neill reports.

The focus on the role of Goldman Sachs in structuring currency and interest rate swaps for Greece a decade ago has highlighted the upside and downside of providing complex liability advice and trades to governments.

Regulators and legislators are rattling their sabres about the demise of privately negotiated derivatives markets. End users – especially corporates – and some on the sell side are not sure they have weighed up the situation appropriately. Hamish Risk reports.

Deutsche Bank announced on Monday the creation of a dedicated FX sales team in the Nordic region.