After 30 years, we’ve revamped FX Week – here’s why

However you’re reading this article – online, in the app, or in print – you’ll notice things have changed. This isn’t FX Week anymore.

FX Week enjoyed a very successful 30-year run as a newsletter primarily for sell-side traders. Its role was to record what was happening – product launches, people moves, speeches, surveys, and so on. For the most part, this was not exclusive content: you could find those announcements elsewhere on the web.

FX Markets has been launched on the premise that the growing, global FX industry is going through a period of complex, structural change – and that we need to do more than round up the news. 

Now, when we cover news, it will be exclusive. If it’s not a scoop or a fresh angle, we won’t report it. But more of our time will be spent trying to answer a different set of questions – not what is happening, but why it’s happening, and how. And who stands to benefit. 

This approach works best when it’s applied to awkward, somewhat technical topics – so our first issue includes stories on the hidden, structural reasons for historically low FX volatility, the weird options trades that preceded Morgan Stanley’s reported $170 million loss, the use of execution algos at Vanguard, and a potential regulatory threat to liquidity aggregators, for example.

Now, when we cover news, it will be exclusive… more of our time will be spent trying to answer a different set of questions – not what is happening, but why it’s happening, and how. And who stands to benefit

It’s a brand of journalism we know something about. It has been the engine behind the dramatic growth of our sister publication, Risk.net. Now – after gathering feedback from dozens of readers in face-to-face meetings last year, and running a survey of other subscribers – we’re applying that approach to the world’s biggest financial market.

As well as asking for more exclusive, insightful content, one of the key findings of last year’s research was that our readers want more inclusive coverage. So, we’ll be writing not with banks or the buy side in mind, but for a full cross-section of the market. 

One thing we’ve learned is that it takes time to produce this kind of coverage. That’s why FX Markets is a monthly publication, rather than weekly. All of the content will, of course, be available online first and will be published through the month. 

Please let us know what you think. Tell us what we’re doing right and what we’re getting wrong. And if there’s something you think we should be covering, we’d love to hear about it.