Citi is proof of the adage: “You can’t be all things to all men.” A mole confided: “I’m all for breaking it up.” In my first column, published in April 2006, I queried the strategy and investment validity of Citigroup. Eighteen months later, I’m still asking the same questions.

Plus Markets, a London exchange group, has launched a new trading platform and expanded the list of stocks it trades. The new system, provided by OMX, will offer cheap quote-driven trading in 7,500 securities including the stocks of all the companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, 70 AIM-listed companies and several of the most liquid continental stocks. This is in addition to the more than 200 stocks listed on Plus itself. The move has come as a surprise to some market observers, who thought that Plus’s ambitions were confined to small-cap and micro-cap stocks and who believed that Plus was positioning itself as an alternative to AIM.

New regulations are always unpopular with bankers struggling to keep on top of increasing numbers of oversight and compliance rules. The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) is proving particularly unpopular with those working in the equity-linked structured note market, who say it is simplistic in its approach to derivatives-based investments.

Another “Tuesday effect”, with Abu Dhabi buying into Citigroup, does not mean a change of fortunes. Now another securities class, “auction bonds” is contributing to the loss of confidence.

Mifid came into effect on November 1 but the market had already been benefiting from the innovation it encourages. Peter Koh reports.

It’s been a very interesting week. On Tuesday morning, I went to a breakfast briefing with FXall. I have to confess I was in a bit of a strop when I turned up.

I was off to the GL Net Forum in London on Tuesday. Over the years, I’ve become a regular at this show – put on by trading solution provider GL Trade – but I’ve kept it a bit of a secret because it’s such a useful source of information.

Do you know your Apportionment from your Binary Options? Your Collateralized Obligations from your Gross Redemption Yields? If not, you needn’t look any further as this exclusive downloadable guide brought to you by Euromoney has over 30 pages of terminology from the financial industry explained.

A degree of blurring and overlapping in the terminology of the banking, insurance and investment management industries has been inevitable. This guide aims to demystify many of those terms, bringing some of the more frequently used technical expressions in all three disciplines into a concise, single volume. We hope it will serve as a useful guide for market participants in all three areas of the financial services sector.

After many years during which change was merely incremental, electronic trading in debt markets is about to be fundamentally transformed. New entrants and platforms have emerged or are mooted, and fresh partnerships are being considered as incumbents find their value proposition under pressure. Dealers and clients will face a completely new way of debt trading. By Alex Chambers.

The launch of faster, higher-capacity systems by exchanges will make life harder for ATSs.

Decisions by two leading banks to allow clients to post bids and offers on their platforms call into question the need for multi-bank portals.

FX banks may need to rethink the way they manufacture and distribute liquidity, entailing benchmarking their trading and revenue capture from clients.

Clearing and settlement in Europe is a complex and fragmented environment. But it is clear from the panel of experts gathered by Global Investor that progress is being made to break down the barriers to the creation of an efficient, streamlined process and a level playing field. Representatives from Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Citi, SEB and Equiduct met at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Paris to discuss what progress has been made and what challenges lie ahead.

In the second part of our debate on FX, we examine the buy side as it develops its interest in new instruments such as exotic options, and examine key areas of innovation such as prime brokerage and e-commerce.

It is often the informal parts of conferences that are the most revealing.

The European Commission’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive is due for final implementation from November. Many participants in the foreign exchange market still seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that Mifid will not have any impact on them, because the EU’s prime intention is to protect retail equity investors. Furthermore, the FX market is relatively confident that it is already delivering excellent execution (see Does FX need best-execution regulations? Euromoney May 2006).

"Mifid represents an opportunity for the well prepared but a problem for those who choose to ignore it."

Later versions are likely to include the ability to enter their own time-delayed orders, minus the potential of having their order front run – whoops! I mean, risk-managed – by the bank

Already worth more than an estimated $2 trillion per day, the global foreign exchange (FX) market is the most transparent and liquid of the world’s financial markets, and will become more so over the coming years, with some analysts projecting continued rapid growth. “This year is set to be when the FX market daily trading volume will break the symbolic mark of $3 trillion,” comments a report published in January by Celent.

Financial markets are always dynamic places and constantly evolving as they embrace change. Today’s foreign exchange market is no exception and it is arguably developing at a faster pace than at any other time in its history. So how will it look in five years’ time? Lee Oliver asks leading FX participants to peer into the crystal ball.

Dear Headmaster: The dog ate my homework and as a result I got some of my sums wrong. It wasn’t totally my fault and I will keep an eye on the rotter to try and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The regulatory framework of Europe’s single payments system is effectively in place. But the details of implementation by banks and corporates are still a matter of debate.

This week: HVB, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barcap, Dresdner, FXMarketSpace, Nylon Capital, ING, Deutsche Bank, Lehman Brothers, JPM, NAB NY.

They used to say in the FX market that what you got paid was highly correlated to what you achieved in terms of revenue generation. It’s always struck me as a false claim, one that is completely at odds with the guaranteed bonus culture that has taken hold over the past couple of decades.

It took a lot of persuasion but eventually I did it.

They used to say in the FX market that what you got paid was highly correlated to what you achieved in terms of revenue generation. It’s always struck me as a false claim, one that is completely at odds with the guaranteed bonus culture that has taken hold over the past couple of decades.

It took a lot of persuasion but eventually I did it.

Posit Now is the latest newcomer to European equities trading venues.

US Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox recently observed at an international regulatory meeting in London that "financial transactions are crossing national boundaries faster than ever before," and that "the world's exchanges are now beginning to combine their operations in order to more closely integrate the world's capital markets". Cox concluded that national regulators "have no choice but to cooperate".

At Euromoney’s Paris Forum held at the end of 2006, the chief executive of BNP Paribas, Baudouin Prot, outlined some of the challenges facing major financial institutions. Principal among these is the growth and globalization of the banking industry. The interview was conducted by Chris Garnett, Euromoney’s director of conferences. Read or listen to it here.