HFT Pushes Small Banks Away from Major Currencies

由于外汇市场高频交易的兴起，许多较小的银行发现自己挤出购买和销售像欧元和英镑一样的主要货币。这些银行专注于新兴市场货币的更高利润交易，并在其具有竞争优势的其他业务中发展其他业务。纽约州棕兄弟哈里曼公司货币策略的全球货币战略总部的股权交易对外汇交易对外汇交易的转化率相同。主要的货币对现在被引用到额外的小数点。对于如美国美元和欧元等组合，这意味着银行正在交易千分之一百分之八。“我们发现竞标和被问及的差价在每年的9％缩小，高频交易正在加速这一过程，”钱德勒说。“我们必须每年增长10％的批量即使是甚至突破，这更难以做，因为这就像反向复合一样。”在2010年关于外汇的论文中，挪威央行国际住区和Dagfinn霜银行的经济学家迈克尔国王指出，电子网络的高频交易是边缘化的小公司。“在这些平台上的紧张招标传播和保证市场流动性正在为较小的球员们对主要货币对的客户竞争，”国王和冯先生观察到“。“越来越多，许多较小的银行正成为这些货币的顶级经销商的客户，同时继续为当地货币的客户制造市场。” Sang Lee, managing partner at Boston-based research firm Aite Group, estimates that high frequency trading accounts for 36 percent of the $4 trillion–plus daily turnover of foreign exchange globally. But in contrast to the equity market, where high frequency trading is the domain of specialty firms, proprietary trading shops in foreign exchange must now compete with big banks like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group. Those players all have specialty platforms that allow customers to participate in their algorithmic trading, much of which is high frequency. The banks act as market makers by setting prices. Lee thinks multinational companies, investment firms and other traditional buyers of foreign exchange will keep relying on smaller banks because they provide credit and other key services. In turn, smaller banks use their big counterparts’ high frequency platforms. Ed Mount, an American who became London-based head of FX technology-based trading for RBS last September, says his bank’s expertise in algorithmic trading has attracted many new customers, including smaller banks that used to be rivals. “We’re market makers to them now,” Mount notes. “They aggregate prices from larger banks, and then they provide a personal relationship with their clients. We’re giving them more and more of our tools as well, and they are an important distribution mechanism to us.” Computerized trading is also drawing clients like investment managers with large portfolios of foreign shares that need to hedge currencies quickly using thousands of pieces of data, Mount says. The algorithms are instrumental in performing gamma hedging, a type of portfolio rebalancing based on price movements of the underlying securities. Besides compressing spreads, high frequency trading makes it more profitable for proprietary shops like Chicago-based Getco and Austin, Texas–based RGM Advisors to do thousands of small transactions, shrinking the size of individual trades.

Many firms for which trading Group of   Ten currencies is no longer worthwhile are choosing to specialize in emerging-markets currencies, where spreads are much wider, BBH’s Chandler says. “If you give a bank a choice between doing $10 in Brazilian reais and $100 in euros, they will make more money in $10 worth of reais than in $100 worth of euros,” he asserts. “It’s not the volume; it’s how wide the spread is.” • •