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Eric Michelsen has left his role as head of online retail flow products at Deutsche. Sources say that while the bank remains strongly committed to retail FX, it does not think that the time is right for a big spend on a multi-asset retail offering. Michelsen is unlikely to remain idle for too long and he is believed to be already considering several opportunities.

Saxo Bank has appointed Jeremy Kang as a senior manager for FX in Singapore. Kang will work alongside Jeff Halley, running the Asian FX market-making desk, and he will report to Steven ‘Wham’ Braithwaite, the bank’s Copenhagen-based global head of FX and fixed-income trading. Kang, who starts on April 28, was previously a senior dealer with Bank of America. He will be based in Saxo's Singapore office.

Retail FX provider Oanda is rapidly building its presence in Asia following the recent appointment of K Duker as its managing director for Asia Pacific. The company has hired Maxine Loh, formerly a marketing director at UBS; Zena Tong, formerly a senior sales executive at Saxo Bank; and Tracey Tan, who was a senior customer service executive at Bloomberg, to work out of its Singapore office. The company says further appointments are likely to be made soon.

Capital Forex, part of the London Capital Group, has hired market veteran David Morris Roe for its institutional FX sales team. Morris Roe was previously at hedge fund OLEA Capital Management and prior to that he had a long career at RBS, where his last position was head of FX trading in New York. In his new role, his focus will be on the alternative investment sector.

The first commentator on the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal to ease exemptive approvals of new exchange-traded funds is asking for disclosure that if mutual funds invest in ETFs they "are creating an additional layer of fees" which cut investor returns. The writer of the April 9 letter, Ron DeLegge, is editor of an ETF Web Site, EFTGuide.com.

We have long identified three underlying causes of the crisis, but this week the figure three arises again in the dangers threatening an orderly move to a rebalanced world economy.

Nobody is perfect. I was reminded of this basic fact of life this week by a senior figure at one of the leading multibank platforms.

In a move that looks similar to the action taken by the US National Futures Association, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission has sent out a reminder that an amendment to its Banking Ordinance came into force on April 1.

Barclays Capital has launched a family of investable FX volatility indices, which it claims is another first, although JPMorgan’s VXY and EM-VXY indices, launched in December 2006, are also investable.

No, not this wonderful column – surely it can’t get much better, but that wonderful lingua franca (I think) of the modern trading environment known as the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) Protocol.

A new report from Celent Communications, Evolution of the Interdealer Broker Industry: Smells Like e-Spirit, predicts that there is still plenty of room for expansion in terms of revenue and the amount of business that is transacted electronically. “IDBs are big – and growing,” the report begins, adding: “The industry reached $7 billion revenues in 2007. Heightened market activity due to the subprime crisis, interest rate and currency volatility, and the furious growth of derivatives in emerging markets such as China, India, Korea, and Latin America, will likely ensure an industry annual growth of around 15% over the next two years to reach $9.3 billion revenues in 2009.”

Todd Bickmeyer, who has had previous stints at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, has resurfaced at UBS in Stamford, where he is on the FX sales desk covering institutional accounts.