Ahead of the London Summit on November 14-15 at The Brewery, Finance Magnates presents a series of interviews with speakers at the event.
30 year lows of GBP/USD are significant, market participants are trading in uncharted territory
What is your position at the company and what does your role entail?
I’m head of options and risk strategy at ThinkLiquidity. In this role I am helping incorporate options as a Risk Management tool for brokers and also a traded product for them to offer their clients. Options are surprisingly underutilized as a commercial product and to manage risk. I am also working on a couple of related projects to improve our reporting capabilities on risk analytics and introduce new layers of risk management strategies that can be overlaid with a traditional A Book / B Book strategy.
Our latest product, QuantView, is a project we’ve been working on for the past few months and are very excited to introduce. I’ve had the opportunity to work with a very talented team of developers and quants on this project and look forward to promoting the many different applications QuantView offers.
What was the single most important event or development that the market saw in 2016?
From a headline perspective it has to be Brexit . There were weeks of preparation and positioning, then the surprise outcome accompanied by massive moves in currencies, rates and assets. While many asset prices recovered within days, the currency moves have been more durable. It’s hard to find a chart that goes back far enough to see the last time 1.30 GBP/USD traded. 30 year lows are pretty significant and market participants are trading in basically uncharted territory.
Want to hear more? Register to the FM London Summit, 14-15 November, 2016.
What are the biggest challenges that the FX trading community is facing? How do they affect your field?
Most of the growth areas in FX tend to be reliant on MT4 to access. It makes it difficult for brokers to differentiate themselves from their competition when the end user has only an appetite for MT4 and all the quirks that come along with it.
When the tradable products, spreads and trading system are all the same, brokers attract flow by paying more than their competitors. We see brokers get cornered into bad IB deals or bad promotional structures. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. It places even greater importance on our risk management services as we help minimize the impact of a bad deal and squeeze the most out of the flow.
What is the main message you’d like to convey to London Summit delegates?
By far the most valuable asset of a broker is the access to aggregate information on the order flow. Figuring out how use the data is a huge challenge, but advances in databases and BI have made it more manageable to gather, measure and manipulate. It’s allowed to us to add layers of granularity and context to information that was unattainable for companies our size just a few years ago.
We are in a unique position to help companies capture key information and add meaningful context that leads to better results.
