not new news.
but something to tickle your brains about the FX market we are in.
Trading Window
As market-makers, banks execute orders to buy and sell for clients as well as trade on their own accounts.
Companies and asset managers typically ask banks to buy or sell currencies at a specified WM/Reuters fix later in the day, most commonly the 4 p.m. London close. That arrangement is open to abuse, as it gives traders a window in which they can adjust their own positions and try to move the benchmark to boost their profit, three of the dealers said.
Customers often wait until the hour before the 4 p.m. close to place large orders to minimize the opportunity for banks to trade against them, one investor and a trader said.
Index funds, which track baskets of securities from around the world each day, are particularly vulnerable because they need to place hundreds of foreign-exchange trades with banks using WM/Reuters rates, according to two money managers. The funds buy securities to match their holdings to the indexes they are required to track. The issue is most acute at the end of the month, when index-tracker funds invest new money from clients.
Concentrating Orders
By concentrating orders in the moments before and during the 60-second window, traders can push the rate up or down, a process known as “banging the close,” four dealers said.
Three said that when they received a large order they would adjust their own positions knowing that their client’s trade could move the market. If they didn’t do so, they said, they risked losing money for their banks.
One trader with more than a decade of experience said that
if he received an order at 3:30 p.m. to sell 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) in exchange for Swiss francs at the 4 p.m. fix, he would have two objectives: to sell his own euros at the highest price and also to move the rate lower so that at 4 p.m. he could buy the currency from his client at a lower price.
He would profit from the difference between the reference rate and the higher price at which he sold his own euros, he said. A move in the benchmark of 2 basis points, or 0.02 percent, would be worth 200,000 francs ($216,000), he said.
Risky Strategy
To maximize profit, dealers would buy or sell client orders in installments during the 60-second window to exert the most pressure possible on the published rate, three traders said. Because the benchmark is based on the median of transactions during the period, placing a number of smaller trades could have a greater impact than one big deal, one dealer said.
Traders would share details of orders with brokers and counterparts at banks through instant messages to align their strategies, two of them said. They also would seek to glean information about impending trades to improve their chances of getting the desired move in the benchmark, they said.
The tactic is most effective with less-widely traded currencies, the traders said. It could still backfire if another dealer with a larger position bets in the other direction or if market-moving news breaks during the 60-second window, one of them said.
A former dealer characterized it as a risky strategy that he only attempted when he had a high degree of knowledge of other banks’ positions and a particularly large client order. Typically, that would need to exceed 200 million euros to have a chance of moving the rate, two of the traders estimated.
‘Massive Size’
Because the market is so large and competitive, it would be difficult for traders to influence rates, said Andy Naranjo, a finance professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville who specializes in foreign-exchange markets.
“I’m skeptical of the ability of traders to manipulate the major currencies in a meaningful way given the massive size of this market,” Naranjo said. “Governments themselves often have a difficult time moving foreign-exchange markets through their interventions, yet they have the additional ability to create fiat money and alter both monetary and fiscal policies.”
Some fund managers say they prefer to use the WM/Reuters rates even if they can be rigged because it’s more convenient and often cheaper than seeking quotes from individual banks, according to two investors. Dealers who agree to trade at the benchmark rate offer a service by taking on the risk that the market moves against them between the time the order is placed and the fix, they said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-1 ... ients.html
