Trading is an information game, and the amount of information available to the market is constantly increasing. At TradeTech FX Europe, the importance of data was a key theme.
Determining when to act on information can be difficult. As Erhard Radatz, global head of portfolio management for Invesco Quantitative Strategies, said, “Financial markets are the lowest signal-to-noise ratio dataset which you can find. It is actually a pretty shitty dataset. The only reason why we all deal with that is because there’s a lot of money to make.”
He explained that he favours looking past short-term noise and relying on a more robust framework, but acknowledged that there are times when engaging with the noise is unavoidable.
“The last one where we really hard to act was Russia-Ukraine, because there was a sanction risk and you just cannot have that in your data. But then more recently, the collapse of correlation between equities and bonds, we’ve seen that in the past and our framework should be resilient to that.”
“It’s not east to distinguish the noise from strong factors,” added Michaël Soued, head of aggregate and multi-asset total return at Ostrum Asset Management, affirming that collecting data and identifying the dominant factors influencing markets at any point in time is essential.
“The market has broadly moved to a data-driven approach,” affirmed Jeremy Smart, global head of distribution at XTX Markets.
“We’ve moved to a place where I don’t really care what you tell me before we start trading, I don’t care whether you’re a hedge fund or a long-only manager or a retail broker. My approach is defined by what the data tells me.”
“I’m looking at the markouts. Unfortunately, in FX all markouts look like ski slopes. The only question is how steep they are.”
But Jonas Virtanen, head of FX spot trading at SEB, warned that figures alone are not enough.
“You need quantitative models and a data-driven approach to analyse client flow, but it’s important to add context to the data,” he said.
Accessing data
Before the data can be analysed and used, it must be found.
“In an ideal world I would have historical data to look at, so that I could make an intelligent decision when pricing you. Often that’s not the case. Generally we have to make some kind of educated guess,” Smart said.
Oleg Shevelenko, head of pricing and execution product and FXGO senior representative at LSEG, agreed.
“Access is very important. A lot of information comes from chats, so a lot of what we do now is process those and aggregate the indicative data.”
The use of chat data has been a growing theme across the industry, with several companies offering services that input chat data directly into operational services.
©Markets Media Europe 2026
