Cesarnc's market talk, gossips, rumours & fun

Done with painting, now trading. The best job in the world.

........i got to first target here but as soon as i took first target, I was stoped at +1, talk about volatility.......

Ok, I need some help.

How do I set the mt4, so the platform show past trades? Thank you.

.......sorry not much can help there, but it sounds interesting, let me know how it goes......

2 ways to solve your prob..

way#1: [the most honest way] open an trade explorer here.. on FF, and you can setup to be viewed only by you [private].. then you go to current trades on that explorer and you can view as a chart... there is also a small check button on the left where you can check in and then you see surrounding trades too,
so why most honest?? b/c you cant hide any other trade bad or good, but when checked you see all trades.. including the position size..

http://www.forexfactory.com/attachme...1&d=1347152921

way#2 .. on your MT4 down left bottom corner, there is an Account History tab.. click on that, and then you'll see the closed trades.. just drag and drop into the chart.. and you'll see them.. [many traders are using this way, but they are filtering only good trades.. ]

Piters

Thank you.

I think the dishonest way will suit me best, I only need to keep my own records, I also find out that it does not work with tick charts but only with standard charts. I guess I have to do it manually.

Here some reading.

06:00 Alarm goes and I’m out of bed. Hopefully I have managed to sleep all through the night, although on odd
occasions I will get a phone call or a text message if anything particularly important is up. Not so often these
days though. The people I work with know how much I value my beauty sleep. Quick shower and shave and
I’m usually out the door some time before 0630
06.30 On the way to the tube station I will have a quick scan through the news headlines on my phone, check
my e-mails, check the spot market levels in Asia etc. By the time I get to the tube station my phone has downloaded
all the early morning research pieces that I’ve been sent so I have something more stimulating than
the free papers to read on the train. It’s a pretty short hop down to Bank (usually around twenty minutes), but
by the time I’m there I usually have a better idea of what has happened of note overnight. Over the years I’ve
found I have improved immensely at ‘skimming’ the morning reading, and can fit a surprising amount into the
time available.
07:00 Usually around this time I arrive at the office. The junior on the desk is more often than not already there
a few minutes ahead of me, and he has some early morning stuff to do for us, which, these days needs minimal
supervision from either myself or any of the other more senior traders on the desk. Nothing earth shattering - a
quick check of highs and lows in Asia, a look to see if any barrier options should have been triggered, and he
also writes a few quick notes to put on our internal chatroom system here for the whole of the trading floor. It’s
a good exercise for him to be able to get up to speed quickly and to be able to precis and disseminate before the
information becomes stale. To give him his due he’s gotten pretty good at it since he started with us around 18
months ago. While he’s doing this, I’ll be logging into all the trading systems we have on the desk, and talking
to a few market contacts either electronically via individual or group chats on Bloomberg, Reuters etc, or down
a sqwawkbox line.
The conversations vary wildly depending on who I am speaking to. Some conversations will be with contacts
in Asia, getting a bit more colour on what was going on overnight, some will be with London contacts at assorted
banks, hedge funds, prop trading houses etc, while other conversations will be with counterparts in the
U.S. who may have woken up in the night to see what’s going on. Some of them are habitual overnight traders,
some merely take a look at their screens if they happen to wake and some will have been woken as a result of
‘call levels’ left with friends and colleagues stating specific trading levels at which they wish to be disturbed.
A friend at a New York based hedge fund calls me up and we chat for a few minutes about the markets, what’s
happening at home, baseball scores (he’s a long suffering NY Mets fan) and anything else. His wife is out of
town this week visiting family and I’ve known him long enough to know that he usually gets restless when that
happens and more often than not ends up trading a bit more overnight than would usually be the case.
07:09 As we’re speaking euro/yen is plummeting through some short term stoplosses, gathering pace on a thin
and illiquid day in London. My friend has a core ‘long risk’ position that he’s very comfortable with, but he will
job in and out around that to keep the scoreboard ticking over so to speak. He actually sold some eur/jpy and
nzd/jpy via my Singapore guys in Asian time, and as we’re sitting chatting he asks me to work a bid to buy half
of that eur/jpy amount back, just below where the market’s sitting. My Yen trader has just stepped off to grab
a coffee, and so coincidentally I am actually covering the yen seat myself for a few minutes. So I’ll watch my
mate’s order here. He leaves me with a little discretion as to how and where to execute (as he trusts me not to
abuse him). All taken care of, he hangs up and goes back to sleep, knowing I’ll call him if there’s anything he
needs to know.
07:18 Price request comes in from a sales guy on the floor, asking for a predatory corporate customer of his. -
“gbp/jpy in 50 please”. I make him a price - “48/60”. “YOURS - you get 50 at 48” replies the sales guy, a little
too quickly for my liking. This smells a bit. The customer in question has a bit of a reputation for ‘drive-bys’,
a practice frowned upon in interbank FX circles, whereby a client will call several banks within a few seconds
and execute multiple large clips of the same currency pair in the same direction. So that the end result is that
the client ends up paying away a spread appropriate for, say, only 50 million sterling when they might have had
ten times that amount to execute in total. And then you have several banks tripping over each other in order to
try and get out of those positions. Sure enough, it’s a mess. gbp/jpy looks heavy immediately, and I can hear the
dollar / yen voice broker over my speakers getting hit repeatedly. I am definitely going to have my work cut out
here, but I am looking to sell some yen in any case, around these levels, for my buddy in New York. Another
salesperson, this time from the desk that services the world’s central banks, is asking us a price “Georgie” (our
sterling trader). “Bid in the cross please mate - just 25, usual guy, full amount, in competition”.
By ‘The Cross’ George knows he means eur/gbp. eur/gbp is trading around 81/83 at the time, having ticked
down from 85 right as the guy started asking for the bid.. “I’ll take that one George” I shout. “Mike - show
81.5, maybe 82 if you have to. Make sure we get these please”. I notice the newest of the summer interns looking
over from the end of the desk, a bit puzzled. I beckon to him. “Meat” (his nickname - fresh meat), come
here, watch and learn. Meat plonks himself down in the empty seat next to me. “81.5 you got ‘em Rich” Mike
shouts out. I just got my 25 Euros. I immediately hit the Reuters Matching system, offering out 10 million of
the Euros at 82. I get paid for (i.e. manage to sell) two million only, and then the price starts moving lower.
80 given, then 80 offered, 79 trading, 78 trading. I shout across to George “pick me up another 27 somewhere
down here please George. George starts working his keypad furiously, pausing a couple of times to lean into the
microphone on his dealerboard and talk to his sterling voice broker. Not much later his price comes back “79.5
or thereabouts”. “Into me at 80” I shout back. I’ll buy the Euros from George at 80 and anything better than that
he can keep in his P+L account for his efforts. As an exercise I get Meat to start jotting down a few numbers on
my paper pad, as the deals from the other salespeople and traders will take a little while to be booked to me.
What have I done so far? Bought 50m gbp/jpy at 143.48 Bought 25m eur/gbp at 0.90815 Sold 2m eur/gbp at
0.9082 Bought 27m eur/gbp at 0.9080 07:25 Netting the 3 eur/gbp deals out shows me having bought 50m
Euros at 0.908067. “so what do we do now?” I ask Meat, he looks at me a touch blankly. I point at the order
manager system on my monitor, showing me all the orders that we are working for clients. One of them, my
friends order to buy eur/jpy is blinking pink and red, indicating that it is very close to being triggered. The notes
column reads ‘Rich, Smalls Discretion, partial ok’, which means I am watching it personally, I have a little bit
of latitude on the level to fill the guy at, and if we get some but not all of his order done that’s ok as long as we
call him. I see realization dawning on Meat’s face. “Err - we need to buy more eur/gbp”. “Correctamundo” I reply,
doing a poor impression of Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. “Check out the big brain on Meat!!. So how
much more? Quickly now”. Meat taps a few numbers through on the calculator. After a couple of goes at it he
gets the right answer. Just over 5 million more. 5 million is a standard amount quoted by the voice brokers all
the time. Price at the moment is a touch higher again. “82/84, two four, two four in a fiver, two four” he repeats.
I thumb the talk button on the speaker for the guy at Icap and say “Take five Parrot” (Parrot is the broker). “Five
at 84 George” He replies. “It’s Rich actually. Thanks mate”. Meat recalculates the eur/gbp average immediately.
I bought 55 million Euros at 0.908097 average. And now it’s easier to see what I’ve done.
I bought 55m Euros at 0.908097, meaning I sold 49.993 million gbp (55 x 0.90897). But I had previously
bought exactly 50m sterling against yen at 143.48. So the sterling amounts from all those trades almost exactly
netted out, leaving me long 55 million Euros against yen, at a price of 130.29375. I look up at the screens again.
eur/gbp is going nuts. 85 paid, 90 paid, 98 paid, 0.9100 bid, 0.9110 bid. It’s dragging everything else with it.
And gbp/jpy is falling through the floor. Some uk news must be out. One of the bond traders is pasting something
into our internal chat session for all, the traders here. Rumours hitting the market of the chancellor being
called to a meeting with Moody’s, one of the ratings agencies. The market knee-jerk assumption is that the
UK’s perfect AAA sovereign rating may be about to be cut and sterling is selling off on the back of it. With dollar/
yen sidelined on this news and hardly moving, but euro higher as a result of all the eur/gbp buying, euro/yen
is of course climbing steadily. I quickly phone my guy in New York back. “Hi mate - you’ve done 55 at twenty
nine and a half so far. Real low’s been around 32 but I got a break and legged into some. Now Darling (the UK
Chancellor), is allegedly meeting Moody’s and euro sterling’s off to the races. Want me to scoop the other ten in
for you?” (his original order with me was for anything up to 65 million). “Nah” comes the reply. “Just work it
back down there again that’s cool. Thanks man. Book em at 31 dude and thanks for hooking me up”. His drawl
so laid back he couldn’t possibly hail from anywhere else than California. “Pleasure mate. I’ll call you if it all
boots off. Go back to sleep”. “Later he says”. He hangs up.
I look at gbp/jpy. It’s getting destroyed. Half the banks on the street were sitting long and wrong when the news
started to filter down, as a result of that little drive-by. So they were all falling over themselves to get out. But
there must have been some sort of a bid in usd/jpy lurking around somewhere, as that side of the equation has
hardly budged, and cable (sterling against the US Dollar) has taken the full brunt of both the panic selling in
sterling yen and also the knee-jerk sterling selling on the back of the Moody’s story. So we definitely dodged a
bullet there.
07:35 “So what’s the moral of that little story then Meat?” I ask him. His reply, about the need to be aware
of all the risks you are running on the desk, and of where and when you can offset one against the other is of
course both correct, and at the same time exactly what a young intern, keen to impress is going to say. But
there’s a simpler moral, and it’s a market phrase it’s time he learned. So I stand up, and so does George, and so
does Mike. And we all shout it out to him in Unison “I’D RATHER BE LUCKY THAN GOOD”. At that point
Lucky (Luke, the yen trader) re-appears. And he’s brought me a coffee. Happy days. I let him settle back in
and then I instruct the junior to square any of the tiny balances in my book and make sure the euro/yen trade is
booked ok. Profit on that few minutes of work - 6,800 Euros. And my guy in New York still walked away very
happy. Job done. I stand up and head off the desk, and over to my office. I have a couple of meetings that will
take a bit of time.
08:05 The first of my two meetings this morning (I have another later in the afternoon). In this case it’s a conference
call with the two senior spot traders in our Singapore office. It’s a regular monthly catch-up that we
have, just to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet so that clients are going to get consistent
prices and service from us regardless of what time they want to transact. Foreign exchange is a twenty four
hour market, five days a week and we’re busy around the clock. Asian time is a touch quieter, and liquidity
concomitantly poorer, but we’ve always been one of those banks that has prided ourselves both on the quality
of liquidity and relationships that we can maintain out there, and also on the fact that we work very hard to pass
that competitive advantage on to our clients. The three of us have a good general chat. I fill them in on the gbp/
jpy trade (as they had got half the story from the internal chat system). Apparently at least two other banks, less
fortunate in the stuff they had in their order books as a backstop, had already had their chief dealers calling the
client up stating in no uncertain terms that this kind of thing is not acceptable any more.
Everyone in the market, both in London and in Asia had seen the trade going through, and it was indeed a total
mess. They ask me if I am going to say anything. I decide against it on this occasion, but also decide against using
it as some sort of a marketing ploy to say how happy we were to see the flow from the client. I take a less is
more approach in this case. Complain too much and the client will just stop doing business altogether. Smile too
much and you’re tacitly condoning their actions. We move on.
Next up for discussion is a slightly thorny topic of Stop-loss orders. Specifically those left by clients towards
the end of the Asia trading day, which then get passed to the London desk around 8am GMT. We had been having
a few issues of late where the Asia guys had decent sized stoploss orders on the books and passed them to
London, at which point, while the dealers in London were sifting through the orders to see what was there of
any size, the market started moving, and flew through the level almost before anyone had had a chance to react,
let alone cover the resulting position. The first time it had happened everyone (including myself) had simply
put this down to bad luck, but after it happened a second time, and after I heard a rumor of the same thing happening
to a mate at another shop, I had started to reach the conclusion that there was possibly more to it than
that. I left the guys in Sing under no illusions as to what I wanted done about this. The desk were not to ‘run’
the stop, but were equally asked not to wait until the last minute to try and start executing the stop. Procrastination,
in this case, seems almost uniformly fatal so I make sure the traders know they have my full permission to
position themselves ‘defensively’ when this client left stops. Maybe he’s leaving some of the order with us and
some away, or maybe he’s just really really good with his technical levels. Doesn’t really matter, the main thing
is that until it becomes apparent that it’s just bad luck, I am assuming that the stops will be tricky to execute,
and taking steps accordingly. To be honest it’s in the client’s interests too as he’ll get far less slippage that way.
The risk is that if he leaves a sell stop the relevant trader gets short just ahead of the level and then the level
doesn’t get triggered and he has to cover the short in a hurry. But given the way the price action on these things
has gone lately, that’s a risk I’m prepared to take.
That just about wraps up the meeting, other than a two minute discussion on whether I am happy to sanction a
(potentially expensive) desk dinner next month. They had in fact only just had one, (last time I was down there,
three weeks ago) but we have a new joiner starting in two weeks time, and we usually make sure there’s some
sort of opportunity to meet the rest of the team outside of work. I agree to the dinner, but ask the guys not to go
too nuts on the wine. That’s where the bills always get out of hand. Meeting over, we adjourn for another month
and I step out to grab a coffee before the next meeting.
08:45 I grab a coffee from the Starbucks concession in the ground floor of our building. God only knows how
much money I go through in that place. I bump into the head of facilities management there, who, it turns
out, I am drawn to play against in the next round of the bank’s open squash knockout competition in a week’s
time. Much banter ensues when he clocks me buying a full fat cappuccino and promptly changes his order to a
skinny, at which point I do too, at which point he changes his to a peppermint tea, at which I change mine back
to the original fatboy order. At which point the barista, getting a bit bored of our antics, hands him the peppermint
tea (which he doesn’t really want anyway) and me my coffee. As Sun Tzu says, every battle is won before
it is ever fought. I head back to the floor chuckling.
09:07 Second meeting and this time an external one. Our representative from EBS comes in to see us to go over
the latest enhancements to the system and how they can benefit us. As we don’t have standalone EBS terminals
any more these days, but instead route all our spot liquidity through a price aggregator that consolidates all the
prices, some of the new functionality changes aren’t 100% relevant to us. But some still are, and in any case
keeping abreast of market developments is part of the job. Luke (who is the nearest we have to an uber geek
on the desk) and our head of e-commerce and electronic trading, Sarah are sitting in with me (or, more realistically,
I am sitting in with them). Some of the enhancements are pretty obvious (new currency pairs that they
are allowing to be traded on the system, which, to be a success will need the buy in of banks prepared to make
markets and commit pricing in the early days) whilst others are slightly more subtle (changes to the quote lifetime
rules aimed at further inhibiting the activities of snipers from high frequency trading houses often accused
of ‘flashing’, i.e. posting quotes and removing them milliseconds later to artificially move the market and profit
from it). Not a problem for us but something Sarah needs to be aware of as she monitors our ‘hit ratios’ for each
ecn to which we are connected (including EBS) to make sure that when we attempt to trade on one of these venues
we have a decent chance of being successful. If, when these changes are implemented by EBS, we find that
they are dropping off our radar in terms of the ratio of successful trades to attempted trades we will tweak our
aggregator’s smart order routing algorithms accordingly. I get sent a detailed statistical analysis of these ratios
and the overall performance of the system once a month by Sarah’s team, and I sit down with Luke (and anyone
else on the desk if needs be) and go over any oddities. All of the enhancements seem straightforward enough. I
duck out, leaving Lucky, Sarah and the EBS rep to discuss a few more of the finer points of the electronic trading
world.
10:45 - everything’s quietened down a bit now. Everyone’s back on the desk and so I am back to my usual job
(aside from all this management malarky of course), which is to quote what are known as ‘commonwealth’
currencies, i.e. the Australian, Kiwi and Canadian dollars. All of them with their own little subtleties, and all
of them at times pretty tough to trade. “Rich - thirteen kiwi yours please”. It’s one of the options traders, Ben.
Obviously hedging some of his delta exposure. But as it’s not something we had on the order book already,
I’m guessing that he’s just in the process of dealing now. “34 worst” I shout. I give myself a touch of breathing
room, saying that I’ll try to improve but the worst I’ll fill him at is 34. On the basis that he’s usually very
smart with his levels, (scarily so sometimes), I decide to go short with him, and start to sell and hit the voice
broker for five million at 35, offer out another five there on Reuters matching and get paid for only four of
those. Then it starts to dry up a touch. Here we go I think. Voice broker is 32/34 now, and Reuters is 31/34 in
small amounts only (less than five). I tweak the settings on my price aggregator a touch and offer a couple of
kiwi out cautiously on the aggregator, to two of the other ecns, at 33. Manage to lose those, so I’ve done 11 all
day. I don’t fancy this at all. Aussie is also getting given now. Voice broker is 31/33 so I hit him in another five.
Then it really starts to run away. I go straight to market on the ecns for the remainder (another four) at 28, and
within a minute it’s getting given at 20, 15, 10. Just nothing there. After five minutes the price starts to stabilise
around 05. I buy back five and hold off on the other two. Alas it never quite cracks the figure and settles back up
at around 20/25 ish. I buy them back there. I’d ended up improving Ben’s rate to 34.5, but all in all, given the
circumstances I’m pretty happy with the morning’s work so far. I’ve had no real firm convictions today, having
been stopped out of a couple of positions over the past 24 hours, I have spent half the morning so far in meetings,
made three prices of any real size, and by my reckoning I’m up around 11.5k in kiwi p&l, plus the 6,800
Euros from earlier. A solid morning all in all, considering the relatively small amount of risk I’ve had on board.
11:40 I’m flat again now, and the market has dried up. It’s lunchtime, with lots of numbers, including employment
data, due up out of the states in the afternoon. So most people have less than zero interest in getting involved
at the moment. Having squared the book I leave lucky watching my book as well as his and step outside
for some fresh air and to grab a sandwich. They have a decent enough cafeteria at work, but I need the fresh air
as I find it all a bit stuffy sitting at the desk all day. Plus I hate the fact that in winter months you can go all day
without tasting daylight. So I make sure I get out when I can from time to time. Ten years ago it wouldn’t really
have occurred to me, but these days I am much better at handling the burnout. I take a brisk walk around Bishopsgate
and London Wall. Oddly enough, as I’m grabbing a sandwich I bump into Parrot (his office isn’t far
from ours). He tries to tempt me to the pub for a swift pint but I want to get back. I need to be out of the door
on time today and I have to write a couple of 360 degree appraisals by the close of business (for the uninitiated,
those are appraisals you write about equivalent level peers within a company, rather than me writing them for
the members of my own team). To be honest they’re a bit of a minefield and I can’t stand them, but hey ho. It’s
mandatory so I might as well at least make a decent fist of them.
12:05 Appraisal time. I’m back in my office, munching my sandwich and typing with one finger. The first one is
Mike, which is actually pretty easy. He’s experienced, thoroughly competent, and as far as his interactions with
spot trading are concerned he’s a model citizen. Done. Next! This one’s tougher. It’s a girl called Carla, who
heads up the middle office functions here. I can’t say we’ve always seen eye to eye if I’m honest. We’ve had a
few run ins over the delivery of P&L and risk reports (both in terms of timeliness and also with accuracy). She’s
not producing them herself, but my personal thought is that she’s had long enough now to whip that team into
shape, having come over from our rivals, I heard, at no small expense to do just that, but I don’t give it both
barrels. There’s almost zero upside to doing that, on any level. For a start, I’m sure she’s both well intentioned,
and, knowing the approach to headcount that all banks take these days, almost certainly under staffed. Plus I
know they migrated onto all new systems six months ago, which was a big part of the problem, and something
she inherited too late to do much about it. The other reason why sticking my oar in isn’t worth the hassle is that
it counts for something like 5% of her overall appraisal mark. So I would achieve nothing by doing this really
(except to royally tick her off). Plus I am deeply uncomfortable about being negative towards co-workers
around this time. Everyone has families to provide for, mortgages to pay etc, so as long as people are doing
what they can I will always try to play nice. I settle for some comments that, whilst highlighting the years issues,
also very vocally underscore just where some of her challenges have come from. Hope I’ve hit the right
mark. She is entitled to read the comments, so I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough. Right. Phew - done for another
year. Haven’t even started looking at my own yet, so I don’t actually know who’s doing my 360. Oh well,
that can wait. I have a touch longer to do my own, it’s just the 360’s they need today.
12:45 Back on the desk. George is delegating the monthly non-farm payrolls prediction competition. Fivers
in, winner take all, forfeits for whoever is furthest away. So Meat has two jobs. Firstly to collect the money
and secondly to take note of the predictions from the room. there are usually about 35-50 people playing so he
walks round doing it on his iphone and getting stick for it and by ten past one he’s finished. 38 people today so
someone will do nicely out of it. We haven’t decided on a forfeit for the loser yet. Suggestions come thick and
fast on the internal chat system. Some REALLY aren’t suitable for reading at work. A fair few involve Meat,
usually but not always in a sexual context. You have to be a bit careful with this kind of thing, especially when
stuff’s in writing. Fortunately Meat is pretty thick skinned but you do get the odd intern who simply can’t hack
it. This is usually when they take it all a bit personally, which it truly isn’t. Luke and George also cop a bit of
flack, (the worst of all actually involves Lucky, and is frankly so appalling that I am amazed that the person
who typed it isn’t sacked on the spot). There are little gasps as people read it and suffice to say the winning
forfeit is a little, ahem, tamer than that. The loser will have to don an outfit similar to Mrs. Doyle from ‘Father
Ted’, and, using a trolley from the canteen, distribute tea to anyone on the floor that wants it, on the next NFP
day. Meat suggests that we add a charitable angle and this is quickly agreed. Cups of tea will be a fiver for that
trolley run only, and we’ll give the winnings to the charity of the loser’s choice.
Market consensus is for the US to have shed around 55k jobs in the past month, although all the rumours we’re
hearing this morning in the market, (and there are always rumours on payrolls day), are for a somewhat more
benign number (one US based house even going for a positive print, which although definitely an outlier, has
nevertheless got a few tongues wagging in the market). We’ll all find out soon enough.
13:15 Everything’s gone eerily quiet. Prices are starting to widen out on all the electronic dealing venues and
the bookies aren’t quoting much at all down the squawk boxes. Our e-trading team have widened the prices
we are showing to our customers accordingly. They are pretty much a self contained unit most of the time. The
early versions of bank e-commerce platforms were unsophisticated pricing engines, very much tied to the rates
that were visible in EBS and Reuters matching (regardless of how much actual hard liquidity was available at
those prices). Once a customer had dealt on the platform, more often than not, the trade would plop into a dealers
position on a bank’s spot desk, and the dealer would manage the risk from there in precisely the same way
as if he’d shouted a price to a salesperson and been hit.
Fast forward five or so years and the landscape has utterly changed. The engines used to derive a price at which
a bank is happy to transact business are, for the most part, both extremely sophisticated, and blindingly fast.
Frankly, 90% of the time, too much human interaction just slows the whole thing down. So the e-commerce
team operate as a separate entity (we on the spot desk are even able to trade on the platform ourselves, to clear
smaller amounts if we wish), and only when things go awry do they need to enlist the help of the spot desk to
offset any risk they incur. The rest of the time they are either skewing their price according to what positions
they are running (if they are long, for example, they’ll be a naturally low offer to persuade other clients to buy
from them thus reducing their long position). If this isn’t having the desired effect the machine will go out into
the market on it’s own and ‘auto-hedge’, reducing positions in a carefully specified manner, and again, at lightning
speed. But once in a while it will still come unstuck, so each trading centre has a couple of traders who’s
job is to monitor any positions that fall through the cracks. Tim is the main guy in London, and NFP day is the
day he hates the most every month. They usually make very good money on these types of days, but equally,
it’s pretty easy for Tim to drop a cartload of money if he isn’t quick and decisive when trouble strikes. It’s a bit
of a poison chalice but he’s pretty sharp at it and is considered a safe pair of hands here. I wander over to him.
“All strapped in?” I ask. “Yep” he replies. “Seat is back in it’s upright position and my table is stowed away.
Should hit turbulence in about 14 minutes.” Hopefully it’ll clear without anyone needing to reach for the sick
bags and oxygen masks I think.
13:27 We’re in trouble! We just got asked a price in eur/usd in one hundred and fifty million and got paid for
them, so my euro trader is short more Euros than he’s easily going to be able to cover. He had made what he
thought was a wide, defensive price that frankly was supposed to discourage the client from trading. But it
didn’t and it gets worse. Tim stands up. “RICH - I need Euros. Been paid three times here now. Not getting
anything back”. Crap. Anything even remotely dollar negative and we’re dead. I sprint over and appraise him of
the fact that we’re in the same position ourselves. He’s short a total of a hundred and thirty five million himself.
A tad suspicious as he’s been hit three times, all equal amounts, all 45 million. The threshold for what we are
happy for the machine to quote without manual dealer intervention is usually a hundred million in normal market
conditions. But prior to major data releases this changes. With 15 minutes to go this changes to seventy-five
million. Then with five minutes to go it’s fifty million. Then, in the final 90 seconds it’s something like twenty
million these days (and of course spreads are also widening out at the same time). It’s not hard and fast - again,
complex algorithms, even incorporating recognition of what the data release came out as, govern both when
and how we withdraw liquidity, and also how quickly we’re able to add it back in again once the initial chaos
calms down. But in any case manual intervention was fifty million and we’ve been hit three times in just under
that amount. But no time for post mortems now. I shout over to Ben “BEN - Any short dated euro in the bookies?
Ship some in - we’re caught here, badly”. “On it” he shouts. Thirty seconds to go. He stands up. “Done 80
of the overnight ats” (at the money options) and there’s another 50 of 30 delta calls out there. Those are 3 days
though, not the Mondays. “Do Em!!” I scream back. He leans over to the microphone and speaks to his broker.
“YOU Got Em Rich - but that’s gonna be it for a bit - nothing else decent out there till after the numbers”.
“Thanks - let meat know the spot refs and any delta stuff asap - I need this booked asap”.
In buying some short dated options I am hoping I have staved off at least some of the effects of a shocking
payrolls number. Unfortunately, I will have had to pay away some premium to buy these options, so one way or
another we’re taking a hit today, but at least we have offloaded some of the risk we were wearing. A six figure
down day isn’t a huge deal - these things do happen. But a seven or even eight figure down day is definitely not
what we were put here to achieve. I have a great team of traders on the desk and for the most part I just try and
leave them to it, but insofar as I have a role to play in trading terms, it is on exactly this sort of occasion that I
need to justify the title on the business cards by making a quick decision in the interests of the bank as a whole.
I look down at the live price and trade feed from Tim’s pricing engine that I have open on my desktop. He’s
showing a tighter price than usual, and it’s definitely skewed higher. The only problem is, no-one’s taking the
bait. He can’t tip his hand too much (and neither can the guy on our desk) as the whole of the market will be
watching for some sign of movement immediately prior to the numbers, and will jump all over it.
13:28 My phone flashes - it’s my friend at the New York hedge fund. “Hey, Rich. Sorry man, need a quick
favour. All my systems just went down here. Can you work a 65 offer for 90 eur/aud?”. I look at where it’s trading
now. 58/62. Very close. “Sure mate - leave it with me. I thumb the mute button and shout over to the commonwealth
trader ‘Hey - we need to buy 140 Aussie, got an offer here in the cross - gonna lean on it with the
short Euros. I leave him to work, watching as he bids for the Aussie Dollars on the Machine. Tim’s also able to
help out, skewing his own Aussie bid a touch higher and getting given a quick 37 million worth from a variety
of high frequency algorithmic model accounts. My friend in New York is trying to sell eur/aud. If you break
that trade down into it’s component parts. he’s trying to sell Euros/ buy US dollars, and buy Aussie / Sell US
Dollars. The US Dollars then net out. But effectively, by way of the driveby that we just endured, the desk has
already done the first ‘leg’ of my friend’s order, getting itself short eur/usd. Now all we need to do is get long
aud/usd. And that should hopefully be a touch easier as there hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, just been a
drive-by in the Aussie. Sure enough, we manage to get all bar maybe twenty million Aussie before the clock
ticks down to the deadline. The price went away a bit at the end so eur/aud has tracked lower as a result.
13:30 The number comes out and the room goes nuts. Headline number is for -125k jobs and the dollar immediately
starts selling off against pretty much everything. The Euro, Yen, Sterling, Aussie and Kiwi are all appreciating
in roughly equal amounts. Suddenly Lucky screams... “This is topping out here Rich. Revisions and
the U-Rate. Watch”. Lucky has a good eye for price action at times like this. And he has correctly noted that
while the headline payrolls number was a shocker, the revisions (i.e. the change to the previous month’s number
once all the statistics have been properly verified) are actually very positive. Plus there’s been a pretty healthy
decline in the unemployment rate, well ahead of what people were expecting. “Turn that Aussie if you can” I
shout, asking my commonwealth guy to sell the Aussie dollars out that he bought. “Already on it Rich - done
fifty right here. Eighty now. Ninety five. Not getting paid any more - comes offered now”. Sure enough, Aussie
has topped out and turned as people digest the story behind the numbers. So we’re no longer short Euros and
long Aussie (against my mate’s order). We’re back to being naked short Euros again but the market’s going our
way.
Euro retreats, taking Aussie with it. Once it’s dipped back to around where we started off the Aussie trader goes
back in and bids to get the Aussie back again. Back to being short eur/aud, but now, we’ve got short at a much
better average rate (if you tot up the P&L from all the ‘jobbing’ in and out in the aud. I look at the chart of eur/
aud and it never went any higher than 58 after the numbers, even in all the confusion. I phone my friend and he
picks up straight away. “You get any done? I kinda blew that I guess”. He’s assuming we didn’t fill his order as
it never really traded up to 65 (and certainly not in his amount, 90 seconds prior to the data coming out). “Done
them at 61. Hope that’s ok mate”. He whoops. He’s very happy with that as the market is now trading around
41/44. “Thanks Rich - definitely owe you dinner now man. Book at 59 as well. Great fill. Gotta hop”. Totting
up the rate in eur/usd and the all in rate for the Aussie, by our reckoning we managed to actually end up selling
the eur/aud at 72 or thereabouts. We wouldn’t pass on all that improvement to my friend, no matter how good a
mate he was, as we had to take on extra risk in order to achieve that price. But in doing so we managed to sell
the cross for him at the highs, just as it dumped. He certainly couldn’t have done that for himself with the tools
he has available at his desk.
So everyone’s happy. Looking over the various blotters I see that most of the short euro/dollar position is now
covered. Largely at a loss (as the guys couldn’t really push the market much in advance of the payrolls number
for fear of tipping their hand). But the options trades we did had given us some positive P&L and also some
long gamma exposure, meaning the options desk had also been trading spot eur/usd on our behalf, selling near
the highs and buying back lower to keep the portfolio broadly delta neutral. I shout over to Ben to see where he
could sell the options back out again, (as the spot position it was hedging was pretty much covered now). He
comes back with some half decent bids for both, (as would be expected given the fact that the market had gotten
itself caught a little short on the bad payrolls number), and we exit that position too.
14:15 Things are nearly back to normal now. We’ve had a few more price requests, in an assortment of currencies,
as the market digests the days economic data. Some requests went well, some less so, but they’ve broadly
evened out. The actual proprietary positions the guys have had on today have been fairly light, which is not
unknown on payrolls day, as the price action can be a bit of a lottery and plenty of perfectly good trading ideas
get blown out of the water in the mad half hour we just had. So discretion is often the better part of valour on
this particular day of the month. Having a quick look at the desk’s P&L numbers so far it looks like we’re down
around $270k, with the e-commerce desk down another $165k. Could have been a whole lot worse. E-comms
were down over $250k at the peak but a combination of the euro’s retracement of some of its gains and the fact
that after things calmed down a bit the day was, as is so often the case, a good source of revenue for the e-commerce
side of things has meant that their numbers are still slowly but surely ticking in the right direction this
afternoon. I can see Tim standing up, blue shirt betraying him with a couple of large sweat patches under his
armpits. He’s talking to Lucky, who, not surprisingly is a lot calmer, having seemed, in line with his nickname,
to have swerved and neatly side-stepped most of the days shenanigans today. ‘In an ever changing world...’ I
think.
15:35 CNBC is on all the monitors on the floor- our chief economist is being interviewed. Side bets are being
taken on the floor on all manner of things related to his appearance. Number of times he says certain words,
how often he wrings his hands, whether or not he gets any facts and figures wrong etc. Some wag already tried
ringing him up (he was caught out that way once before having not turned his mobile off for the interview,
but he’s reverted to being the consummate professional today, so no joy). At the mention of one slightly odd
phrase there’s a massive cheer from the interest rates desk, followed by some booing from the sales guys behind
me. Turns out his challenge today had been to work a farmyard animal into his interview responses (I had
been off the desk when this all transpired and no-one had mentioned it to me in the chaos). Sweepstakes were
taken on which animal would be first to be mentioned and it looks like the rates desk came out winners. George
informs me that they had gone for pigs, and in formulating a response to a question about the ability of the US
to respond more rapidly to economic and structural events than the somewhat cumbersome coalition that is
the Eurozone he had used as an example of less able economies, those of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain,
otherwise known as the P.I.G.S.. Once again money is changing hands rapidly.
15:45 Lucky strikes again. Handed an order at 15:35 for a pension fund, to sell 220m usd/jpy at the 4pm WMR
fixing rate. This should see him do pretty well on the day. He needs to sell the dollars and is agreeing to execute
with the client at 4pm at whatever the official rate is that is published shortly after the hour by WMR (A subsidiary
of Reuters that offers data related services like this). But nothing says that Lucky has to wait until 4pm
to try and sell all the dollars. He is perfectly at will to do so earlier and so he does. Starting at a price around
94/96, he steadily sells them from around 15:45 onwards, seeing the price gradually fall as he does so. At 16:00
he is effectively going to be given all the dollars back by the client he has agreed to do the fix trade for, and will
find out, shortly afterwards, what rate he’s dealt at. So the trick is to make the market end up lower than where
you started selling, booking a profit on the trade. From the client’s point of view they get a transparent rate (as
the fix rate is published on WMR’s website, Reuters pages etc, but the cost for that is that it is in Lucky’s direct
best interests to push usd/jpy as low as he can before it fixes. So the client usually doesn’t get a great rate on a
larger trade. But there are a few structural reasons why sometimes they still wish to transact this way (although
it seems a poor tradeoff to me). In any case Lucky does a solid job of judging just when he can start to push
usd/jpy lower without running out of ‘ammo’ too fast and he does the desks day no harm at all, banking around
$75k on the trade.
16:20 We’re pretty much done for the day. The Group treasurer of the bank wanders over from his office, possibly
as he saw the running P&L numbers for the day. We have a quick chat about the days events and he seems
relaxed. Not because he expects Tim and myself to do nothing about the problem with the trades in the run-up
to the numbers, but because he trusts us to sort it out. It’s a short conversation and given how much money it
cost us, it’s not too bad. Post mortems will be had, just not today.
16:45 I power down my PC having checked all my positions and said goodnight to a few people on assorted
chats and down a collection of speakerboxes. The others are mostly doing the same, with the exception of
Lucky, who is busy sorting out a lot of bookings related to the fixing trade. Turns out the Asset Manager who
did the trade wanted it split across all sorts of different pension funds and all sorts of different dates. So he may
still be there while we grab the first beer in the pub downstairs. Oh well. Can’t live up to his nickname all the
time. Where’s the fun in that?
17:20 Downstairs and most of us are there. On payrolls day we always have a tradition of everyone making a
bit of an effort to at least have one or two drinks together before they head home. Some, (younger ones usually),
will stay longer. Some with families stay an hour then head home. But when everyone has a drink in hand we
gather in one corner of the pub and George ushers Meat into the middle of all of us. “So, Meat” he says, “Did
you learn anything from your first proper full on hairy payrolls day on the desk?” Meat predictably can’t quite
shake off the eager to please college boy spiel and starts launching into a little diatribe on liquidity, not trusting
dodgy corporates etc etc before crumbling under the sheer weight of catcalls and taunts from the others “All
right, all right, I Get it!!!” He wails “All together now.....” and as one, the sales desk, traders, head of research,
Meat and all the others shout out the time honoured six little words that, at least this time, have defined our
day.. “I’D RATHER BE LUCKY THAN GOOD”. For today, I think, happily we were probably both.

good luck on that mate.. there are some indies, or even EA's on net sending closed trades as CSV file [excel] realtime.. I dont have any of.. but you can search ff or other sites..

try trade log.. maybe is what you are looking ??

http://www.forexsmarttools.com/forex_trade_log.html

Thanks, I will look at the link.

At the moment I have my spread sheet in excel and I need to input manually which I find it very boring.

there must be some simple solution for that.. try here too..

http://www.mql4.com/search#!keyword=account%20history

OK.

went short eurcad on the daily, gained about my risk and moved SL to BE.

Not feeling today, could be a range day, good for scalping.

am close all my contacts for 3 weeks over...and just open my mobile etc..and just find out one of my friend sister was pass away...a year ago his father passed due cancer...now his sister,as i know his family person all's live very healthy...no smoke,no drink,and always exercise...

life really unpredictable ~ Sad Really Sad...

......Very sorry about your loses Sir. FXMindset, hope god have them in glory eternaly, very sorry about it man......may them rest in peace.....

Thank you Sir,,,am Just find it really unpredictable...Too Sudden,while his Dad and Sister always live healthy...

Yes i am to Fx..an you wonder why.. dont you when it hits so many in the one family..

Thanks Danc,am going to visit him,...trying contact him now,

See u all laters

Condolences

45C

......Hope all goes well Sir. FXMindset, god speed.....

.......sad in deed, I mean there is a bunch of clowns, smoking and drinking untill the liver is out and the go by, and some other victims go without notice, oh well the world we leave in, have to give thanks for the days left on our lives, and the ones pass......

How is everthing Sr. do you still long cable?

Yes, still long on Cable... IMF's growth forecast for the UK from yesterday perhaps scaring a few, but the National Institute of Economic and Social Research states growth at 0.8%.

Pff, swing and roundabouts.

Still trying to decide on direction for instruments, to be honest, and was out yesterday and Monday, and so could take no action.

If price breaks the aqua MA of the Guppy profile,hmm, well, the 1.56/ascending magenta TL may be the next stop.