For the modern foreign-exchange (Forex) trader, it’s now possible to find a date, hail a cab and trade $100 million — all through their mobile phone.
However, half of the respondents, most of whom were FX traders, said company policy preventing trading on mobile was the main obstacle.
The adoption follows a surge of online, or electronic, trading in the $5.1-trillion-a-day currency market as companies look to cut costs and keep better audit trails for their transactions. Traders conduct about 74 percent of their notional volumes electronically on average, up from 68 percent in 2017, according to the survey.
“As products become more electronic, you see more volumes come through, and the transparency increases,” Wacker said. “It creates quite a bit of efficiency, so it allows institutions to drive down their execution costs.”
New MiFID II rules this year also loom large, with 73 percent of traders in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region saying it would have a daily effect on their jobs. That compares with 47 percent in the Americas and 45 percent in Asia Pacific.
JPMorgan’s electronic currency swap and forward volumes have almost doubled since the rules came into effect at the start of the year, according to Wacker.
Bloomberg