Top Headlines

FXPA Introduces New Membership Categories – FXPA The Foreign Exchange Professionals Association is now offering additional institutional categories of membership effective January 1, 2016. The new Associate level categories are designed for smaller buy side and technology firms, as well as regional and private banks.

China Sets Yuan at Four-Year Low in ‘Stress Test’ – Wall Street Journal (subscription) The central bank wants to see to what extent it can let market forces determine currency’s value.

OPEC Provides Economic Stimulus Central Bankers Can’t or Won’t – Bloomberg The world’s central bankers just got a helping hand from the world’s oil ministers.

Currencies of Oil Producers Weaken Further – Wall Street Journal (subscription) Declining oil revenue are straining current-account balances of Canada, Mexico and others.

• Biggest 2016 Risk May be The One Just Behind Us: Oil – Reuters
• Norway Oil Fund Dumps Bonds, Clearing Path to Quarterly Profit – Bloomberg

Quantum Supercomputers Entice Wall Street Vowing Higher Returns – Bloomberg You may soon be able to see every conceivable outcome of a wager, say on interest rates, over many time horizons — thanks to computers that rely on the uncertainty at the root of all matter.

Regulatory News

Euronext and Virtu Fined Over High-Frequency Trading – The Trade Euronext Paris and high-frequency trader Virtu Financial have been fined €5 million each by the French regulator for risking the orderliness of the Paris market.

Shell May Shift Trading to US or Singapore Over Mifid II – Risk (subscription) The trading arm of Royal Dutch Shell may relocate some activities to hubs outside the European Union, such as the US or Singapore, due to the looming costs of the EU’s new Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), according to an official with the UK- and Netherlands-based oil major.

Japan Regulator Seeks Penalty for Deutsche Bank – Wall Street Journal (subscription) Japan’s securities-market regulator said Tuesday it has asked the Financial Services Agency to punish Deutsche Bank AG’s investment-banking unit in Tokyo for improperly providing information about a Japanese company to its clients.

Company News

Morgan Stanley to Cut 1,200 jobs, Take $150M Charge – CNBC Morgan Stanley plans to cut 1,200 jobs, or 2 percent of its global workforce, taking a severance charge of about $150 million, a source told CNBC on Tuesday.

• Morgan Stanley Appoints Britain’s Alistair Darling to Board – Bloomberg

Markit CEO Sues Unknown Hackers Over ‘Campaign of Extortion’ – Reuters Markit Ltd’s chief executive filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing unknown individuals of hacking into his computers, phone and emails to try to intimidate him and extort money.

Market Savvy  

CTAs Recover to Post Strong November Performance – Profit & Loss After a dip in October, CTA strategies posted positive returns across the board in all of Newedge’s CTA indices in November 2015.

Positively Disrupting the US Treasuries Market – TABB Forum The US Treasuries market is the largest debt market in the world, but its highly competitive and regulated environment has historically ensured a relatively slow pace of adoption in innovative trading technology compared to the FX and equities markets.

Biggest Bank in Denmark Warns `Emergency’ Rate Damage Is Growing – Bloomberg Danske Bank says Denmark’s negative interest rates have lasted longer than anyone could have expected, with the damage to the financial industry growing increasingly burdensome.

Press Releases

Oanda to Offer Algo Platform – Profit & Loss Retail FX-broker Oanda says that it will offer clients an institutional algorithmic testing and execution platform through its partnership with Seer Trading Systems.

Industry Events

11th Annual FIA Asia Derivatives Conference, 8-10 December in Singapore