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Howard Hoskin
Managing Partner
Howard Hoskin is an accomplished sales professional with a diverse and extensive background in electronic trading and fixed income. With over 10 years of experience at Bloomberg LP, Hoskin has held multiple leadership positions including EMEA Sales Manager for Global Markets, APAC head of FICC e-trading, and EMEA head of FI e-trading. He is currently the Managing Director of Institutional Cross Asset Sales at Fenics. Alongside his career in finance, Hoskin is a former international hockey player for England. He holds a BA from the European Business School in London.
Highlights
https://lnkd.in/eqfpqY72
A month or so ago I commented on Colin Lambert and his ongoing noise around the 4pm #Fix. Well, surprise surprise, he's at it again and this time he has produced a chart showing how much is being left on the table. Anyone who has pitched a client about a product will know that once the buying signals have been registered, there is always a delicate discussion around the price of the product.
In #FX trading terms that discussion tends to revolve around $ per million. Depending on which platform you use that debate may range from $2-$10 per million and is mostly charged to the sellside on the back of the transaction. For trading at the #FIX off the electronic platforms the fees tend to be pre-agreed between the buy and sellside but will no doubt be within that same platform fee range. Multiply that by the notional volume that a buyside transacts and you get the total cost element of the transaction.
Who actually pays that fee? Well, in the end all the fees are covered by the person using the service - ie: the end user (the investor, the pensioner). Or as one tutor at my grad program for my first job explained to the class, "Remember, the customer always gets screwed!"
Now to the interesting part. What if these these "fees" were totally insignificant compared to the actual savings that could be made by transacting at a level that is actually reflective of the market. What if the power to change things actually lay with the end user and not the sellside who pay the fees
Well.... have a read of Colin Lambert's article and you will see that he is quoting an average saving to the "customer" of $321 per million. That's 32x the savings over the top end of the fees range and if you happened to be putting a FIX order in for USDJPY at the end of June then the difference would be $753/million (according to the FullFX).
If the FX rate is rising into the FIX it is probably because there are net more buyers than sellers, so why wouldn't a real money player with a fiduciary responsiblity to it's customers want to execute at that better rate?
To put it into perspective.... imagine there are two petrol stations next to each other on a main road. One sells Unleaded petrol for 150p and the other sells it for 4,800p (that's 32x btw). My 8 year old daughter would ask me some pretty searching questions if I drove into the latter for my petrol.
For those in control of trading decisions at the price taking firms, based on the evidence of the #FullFX above you are asking the end consumer to purchase the equivalent of a brand new £30k car for every 12 visits to the petrol station. That's some ask....
https://lnkd.in/eigvM_ir
This is not the first time that Colin Lambert has questioned the effect of the current state of play with the FX 4pm fix with respect to Pension money and he makes a pretty unambiguous statement in this article fresh off the press.
"As things stand, the busiest period of any month in FX, one in which billions of dollars’ worth of trades are benchmarked, is going through a flawed and out-dated process, and to make things worse it is doing so too quickly"
- If you are a bank, should you be getting in front of this and offering choice to your customers?
- If you are a fund manger or an execution trader at a fund hedging FX on behalf of the end investor should you be asking your bank(s) about what options they offer?
As ever in life, doing nothing is also a choice that you make. In the past there are plenty of examples where regulation has quite happily back-dated it's actions. If Colin Lambert is to be believed then it would be prudent to start paying closer attention before it is too late. The Australians have already been warned in an open letter on February 1st of this year to the CEOs by their regulator (ASIC) https://lnkd.in/eypmRzNi
Where there's smoke.......
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