Olsen

USD_JPY collapsed from 90.60 to a low of 88.65 in 30 minutes taking down AUD_USD from 88.00 to 86.15. The Scale of Market Quakes for AUD_JPY recorded a strong quake of 4.4. Three trades triggered the move: margin calls on long AUD positions, liquidations of short JPY and short USD positions. The market was building [...]

In the first blog on how to trade I have tried to explain why traders should not rush to open positions and that there was always another profitable trading opportunity in the waiting. The second blog is devoted to the phenomenon of the butterfly effect of cascading margin calls, which in my view is one [...]

The international response to the Haiti earthquake was immediate and illustrates the benefits of the Richter scale. Thanks to the global seismic surveillance systems, geologists could accurately measure the strength of the earthquake: it was a major earth quake of strength 7.0, there was no need for second guessing. A major earthquake in a densely [...]

Financial markets still follow business conventions that were adopted at a time when transactions were executed manually. Hidden to the public are the details of processing of the trillions of USD transaction volumes traded on a daily basis in the world’s financial markets. Given the huge amounts of money involved, one would assume that the [...]