What’s the most important thing we need to have in order to follow financial markets? Burgers… ok, I made that up, the real answer is market data! Whilst there are many other datasets including those drawn from alternative data, which are becoming increasingly important, having a handle on the asset prices is still key. When…
Category: Foreign Exchange
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, TCA
TCA to improve your investing
by Saeed Amen •
Chips are supposed to go with burgers, or with fish. However, there are times when chips by themselves are exactly what you need and also as a side for many other dishes. Probably my favourite chips are from Vlaams Friteshuis Vleminckx. It doesn’t look like much, a tiny takeaway nestled in the streets of central…
Foreign Exchange, General
Separating our politics from trading decisions
by Saeed Amen •
Everything appears to have become a political question these days, even whether or not you like burgers (ok, I made that one up, but hopefully you get the point). Of course, financial markets have always been impacted by politics and arguably even more in recent years, with events such as Brexit and the Trump presidency.…
Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Corporates and trading FX
by Saeed Amen •
When was the last time you went on a plane? Probably, a long time ago! Let’s just take ourselves back to that point. Why did you get on a plane? There could be many reasons. Perhaps you went on holiday or maybe it was for a work meeting. In most cases, it is unlikely you…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General
Political market making
by Saeed Amen •
It is challenging to understand how to model external shocks when trading financial markets. However, in recent years, it has become particularly notable that these risks, such as Brexit, the election of Trump, or coronavirus can greatly impact markets. Hence, we need to have a way to model them. In this paper we investigate the…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Python, TCA
Using Python to explore FX market microstructure
by Saeed Amen •
I am sure like most readers, I’ve lost count of the number of weeks since things were “normal”. When will things get back normal? Maybe weeks or more likely months? I suppose that using a Python function random.random(), might be the best approach here! However, in the meantime, I’ve been trying to work hard at…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Python, TCA
How to do TCA with tcapy in Python
by Saeed Amen •
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on tcapy, a transaction cost analysis library in Python, which I’ve recently open sourced. As a result I’ve been thinking about TCA for a long time. Why is it important to do transaction cost analysis on your trades? Ultimately doing TCA can save you money on your…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Python, TCA
How to speed up Python and TCA
by Saeed Amen •
Somewhat abusing a quotation by Dickens, coding is the best of times and also the worst of times. The worst of times are those hours spent debugging, what appears to be some innocuous code, that throws an exception for some totally inexplicable reason. When you find the problem it is usually something which was incredibly…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Python, TCA
Cuemacro’s TCA software is now open sourced
by Saeed Amen •
It’s a difficult time at present around the world. You obviously don’t need me to tell you that. Let’s hope that we can conquer the coronavirus soon and we all give thanks for those on the front lines, working in hospitals caring for the sick, those working in supermarkets and all those keeping society going…
Foreign Exchange, General
Correlations and trading
by Saeed Amen •
Correlation not causation. Ok, we’ve heard that thousands of time before. The difficulty is that we cannot simply ignore correlation if we are trading financial markets. The relationships between different assets and other data is often crucial to forecasting the market. If we were forced to ignore it, you’d end up ignoring so much data…