Derivs - FX

Market participants have been active in options on the US dollar against the yen following comments from Governor Haruhiko Kuroda setting out an unchanged monetary policy. The highlight of the flow was one investor picking up a sizeable at-the-money straddle on the pair.

Foreign counterparties that fall under the scope of European Markets Infrastructure Regulation could find that derivatives transactions priced as OTC are retrospectively eligible for clearing under third-country equivalence rules, according to lawyers. It means that participants could be entering OTC trades at different pricing levels compared to those trades eligible for clearing, while finding later that they will also have an obligation to clear that OTC trade.

The NASDAQ OMX Group has made Thomas Wittman, former senior vp and head of US equities and derivatives, an executive vp and global head of equities.

Paul Allmark, ex-global head of electronic trading at Thomson Reuters in London, has joined ICAP's EBS business as global head of e-commerce solutions, also in London.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association and the Futures Industry Association Europe have published a cleared derivatives execution agreement for principle-to-principle client clearing.

Global fx dealers are urging the European Commission to adopt one single cut off-period that delineates fx spot contracts from fx forwards and other fx instruments. Fx spot transactions generally settle within two valid banking days and dealers have urged the Commission to define an FX spot contact as an agreement between two parties to exchange one currency for another within the customary timeline of the relevant spot market.

Trading Technologies will offer access to futures and options on the Taiwan Stock Exchange’s main stock index TAIEX via its Eurex gateway, following Eurex and the Taiwan Futures Exchange linkage on May 15.

Market participants are taking on unnecessary exposure and ignoring credit risk in the search for yield in fx as volatility continues to remain at abnormally low levels, according to strategists.

TriOptima has started offering data verification and portfolio reconciliation of trade repository data for OTC derivatives portfolios in CME’s swap data repository, at the request of mutual clients.

CME Clearing Europe has received regulatory approval from the Bank of England to offer a full segregation model for client collateral, after European asset managers pushed for greater protection for collateral held as initial margin in cleared trades.

Exchange-traded fund manager WisdomTree has launched two ETFs on the New York Stock Exchange, with one deploying fx forwards to hedge currency risk.

Institutional investors have been buying short-dated euro puts on € against the US dollar as the pair crawls higher.