The ever affable and diligent Andy Durrant has left his role as head of EMEA FX sales at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in London and is off to join UBS, which is clearly looking to build again. Durrant is joining the bank in a new role: head of e-marketing in Europe. He will be based in London and report to Julian Wantling, co-head of FICC distribution, EMEA, as well as to Simon Wilson Taylor, the bank’s recently appointed global head of FICC e-commerce. The equally affable Will Patrick and Dave Emerick will assume Durrant’s responsibilities at the CME.

I was just putting the finishing touches to an article on whether or not Reuters and EBS had lost their ‘control’ on price discovery, when a contact called to tell me that EUR/NOK trading had ground to a halt on most platforms as a result of what he called a “rogue” order. Apparently, an offer to sell €1 million at 8.5420 was put on Reuters, which at the time was a couple of big figures below the market. However, it apparently came from an institution whose credit is so bad that nobody could lift it. The result was that it screwed up most other banks’ pricing streams – I hear Barclays was one of the exceptions. As a result, prices went ridiculously wide for quite some time. For the moment, Thomson Reuters (as we must now call it) isn’t shedding much light on the issue. “We are currently pulling together the results of our investigation, which we wish to share with clients before we share with others,” it says. At least it should take some comfort that it still clearly exerts a huge degree of control over EUR/NOK pricing.

Although it has been one of the market’s worst kept secrets, the announcement by Chicago Mercantile Exchange chief executive Craig Donohue that it will launch OTC FX clearing by the end of 2009 came as a bit of a surprise. According to Dow Jones Newswires, Donohue broke the news on the sidelines of a conference in Chicago on Wednesday. Apparently, the CME has decided to go for a soft launch, perhaps as a result of the debacle around FXMarketSpace that proved to be more FXWasteofSpace.

The post-credit-crunch environment has thrown the spotlight on intra-day liquidity facilities. Once taken for granted, these have now become a symbol of the changing relationships between banks and clients in cash management, and of the stresses still inherent in the global credit system.

I was having a coffee with someone from the ‘dark side’ recently who asked if I’d ever wondered what had happened to all the bank algo traders. His assertion was that a lot had decided to quit their positions and set up on their own this year after not being remunerated as well as they thought they should have been.

In case you missed it, what with the market starting to move about a bit again this week, Standard Chartered announced on Monday that it had decided to sponsor Liverpool Football Club – the largest commercial deal in the club’s history no less.

This week, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) reminded the FX market that it will conduct its eighth triennial turnover survey in April and June 2010. In a new move, BIS will publish two reports. One will cover global activity on traditional FX markets and associated OTC derivatives instruments. Preliminary results should be published at the end of August 2010. The other report, on non-FX OTC derivatives and CDS global positions is of no interest to me whatsoever.

I’m in the process of setting up a new venture to sell older, but not obsolete trading technology.

Okay, so something got lost in the translation, but Portugal’s Espirito Santo Financial Group (ESFG) has increased its share holding in Saxo Bank from 2.5% to 5%. In total, ESFG, with its subsidiary Banco Espirito Santo, now owns around 10% of Saxo. At the same time, Saxo is acquiring 25% of Banco Best, the online subsidiary of ESFG and Banco Espirito Santo. The transactions follow an initial agreement signed in January 2008.

Saxo has further increased its physical presence in Europe by opening up an office in Amsterdam. The Dutch office is the fourth new office for Saxo Bank in Europe and the Middle East this year. The office, which was opened by Tour de France legend Bjarne Riis, will be run by Peter Comstock and P.J. Datema.

Gain Capital, the retail specialist that recently filed for an IPO, has launched its forex.com, trading platform in Japan. “Japan is a very important market for us,” says Gain’s chief executive Glenn Stevens. “FX as an asset class is popular among Japanese investors and we believe that the retail FX market in Japan will continue to grow.”

As Primal Scream might have sung: “Dealers keep dealing, Merrill keeps hiring, the door keeps spinning, the bonus pool is dwindling.” Yep, it’s another week and another in and out at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Hurtling out through the spinning door is Colin George, who did USD/JPY options in Hong Kong. Possibly rushing in is Ben Rosswick, who left his position as EUR/USD option trader at Deutsche London this week. Hiring at this time of year is always expensive, so quite what the impact is on the BofA Merrill bonus pool for those people who have been there for some time can only be imagined. I’ll wager it isn’t positive.

CIBC has hired Sheree Ma as an executive director in Hong Kong and Ian Bisset as a director in Tokyo. Both will be part of the bank’s financial solutions group. The bank says they will play key roles in its efforts to grow business and strengthen client relationships in Asia.

As its plans to launch a European clearing house move closer to fruition, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is continuing to hire. Its latest recruit is Tina Hasenpusch, who has joined as an associate director, clearing solutions at CME Clearing Europe. The exchange says she will be responsible for researching and evaluating new clearing business opportunities; providing input on the European regulatory and legal issues that impact clearing services; directing projects to implement our European clearing services; and grow the business through customer adoption. Hasenpusch, who will be based in London, was most recently at Barclays Capital. She reports directly to Andrew Lamb, chief executive of CME Clearing Europe

Matt Yell has apparently left his role in hedge fund/CTA sales at Calyon Hong Kong and gone for a spell at UBS Singapore.

Corporate losses on currency derivatives have increased the pressure on banks, as well as calls for improved transparency, the enforcement of margin-call documentation, regular marking to market, exchange trading of products and the use of clearing houses. Chloe Hayward reports.

Retail platform provider Gain Capital, owner of the forex.com brand name, signalled just how fast and far the sector has developed when it filed for an initial public offering on August 31. The company, which was formed in 1999, is planning to offer around $125 million of shares, with the proceeds going to the company’s existing shareholders. Gain has declined to say what percentage of the company the IPO represents.

The ever pleasant Ben Welsh, former head of fixed income, commodities and currencies at UniCredit Markets and Investment Banking, started at JPMorgan in early September as managing director, proprietary trading, in the bank’s commodity group. Bizarrely, JPMorgan declined to comment, perhaps as a result of the wave of publicity generated by the defection of several of its prop team to Barclays. Market sources are openly speculating that Welsh will soon be joined by former colleague Dan O’Sullivan, previously global head of FX trading at UniCredit.

Re-elected president set on more clean-ups; Economy on a steady growth path

Danish online specialist Saxo Bank says it managed to maintain its revenues in the first half of 2009, although an increase in its operating costs, primarily as a result of new office openings, product launches and contributions to the Danish State Guarantee Scheme, adversely affected its pre-tax profits. These came in at DKr55 million ($10.6 million), compared with DKr162 million for the same period in 2008. Operating income remained stable at DKr969 million. "We did expect 2009 to be a difficult year," said Saxo’s joint chief executives Kim Fournais and Lars Seier Christensen. "However, the results reassure us that we took the right decision when we chose to steer the bank into a new phase based on a more flexible structure before the financial crisis took hold."

The sub-prime crisis has presented opportunities for institutions whose balance sheets have been left relatively intact to boost their trading operations, not least in foreign exchange. Several, such as Canada’s CIBC and Japan’s Nomura, have already started to build out their FX businesses, while the market is still waiting to see how existing heavyweights HSBC and JPMorgan will evolve. BNP Paribas is another player that market participants might be wise to watch.

Can the increase in US wholesale prices mean that the switch from deflation to inflation is nearer than we thought? Profits taking may be the best option for bond investors.

Deutsche Bank has become the latest bank to incorporate algorithmic trading functionality into its proprietary trading platform. The tool, called autobahnFX Algo, will enable clients to control how they time and price large orders with greater levels of precision, efficiency, flexibility and transparency.

China signals its intent for the yuan to become a reserve currency soon.

It was off to Barclays Capital on Wednesday to see the unveiling of the new improved version of its Barx trading platform. The system, labelled PowerFill+, has been out in beta release with selected clients for a few months. Word has already filtered back about its impressive functionality, so I was looking forward to seeing for myself if it was as good as people have been telling me.

If being handed a £2.45 million fine by the FSA was painful for Barclays, it probably felt lucky it was not dealt with by the Florida Office for Financial Regulation, if a report carried by Securities Industry News was anything to go by. “Merrill Lynch latest to be fined in ongoing ARS probe,” screamed one of its headlines, which suggests that punishment in Florida for financial misdemeanours is being taking to the extreme. I just wonder if the regulator will ever get to the bottom of it.

Retail specialist Oanda, whose growth has been fuelled almost totally by word-of-mouth recommendations rather than fancy marketing, has opened an office in Dubai. The timing of the move looks slightly odd, given the slowdown in the region, but with the company’s track record, it may well prove prescient. The office will be managed by Paul Hayward and focus on high-net-worth investors and institutions in the Middle East.

Oanda opens in Dubai...

ICE Futures US says that a record number of contracts in its dollar index futures changed hands on September 8. A total of 47,404 lots traded, beating the previous record of 45,614 contracts established on September 10 2008, which was also a calendar roll.

System provider TraderTools has integrated the complex event processing (CEP) technology it recently licensed from Aleri into the pricing module of its liquidity management platform (LMP). The company says this will allow users to create custom-made rate models – based on its resting order book and net positions – to shape and skew prices more effectively.