FX, Rates and Global Macro Markets

Currencies and interest rates are the largest markets in the world and the ones in which individual traders have the least natural edge. The Bank for International Settlements' Triennial Survey put global foreign-exchange turnover at $9.6 trillion a day in April 2025, up 28% from $7.5 trillion in April 2022 (BIS press release, 30 Sep 2025; the BIS's December 2025 Quarterly Review gives ~$9.5 trillion, +27% — use either with its date), of which spot was ~$3 trillion and FX swaps ~$4 trillion; daily turnover in OTC interest-rate derivatives rose ~59% to ~$7.9 trillion (BIS, 30 Sep 2025). Most of that is dealers, banks, asset managers and corporations moving and hedging money, not speculation. But these markets also produced some of trading's most famous single bets and worst blow-ups. On 16 Sep 1992 ("Black Wednesday") sterling left the European Exchange Rate Mechanism after George Soros's Quantum Fund and others sold it short (Shared facts, C04: Quantum's short >$10bn; profit usually given as ~$1bn, with $1.8bn and "over £1bn" also reported — none audited). On 15 Jan 2015 the Swiss National Bank removed its EUR/CHF 1.20 floor without warning, and the franc's jump left retail FX customers of FXCM owing the broker $275.1m (FY2015 10-K; the company's Jan 2015 release said over $225m — Settled by C15), which was rescued by a $300m Leucadia loan (Shared facts; credit agreement of 16 Jan 2015). On 5 Aug 2024 the unwinding of yen-funded carry trades sent the Nikkei 225 down 12.4% in a day (AP/Nikkei reports) and the VIX to 65.73 intraday (Cboe data; close 38.57). And in March 2020 the "dash for cash" disrupted the US Treasury market, the world's benchmark safe asset, partly as hedge funds unwound leveraged cash-futures basis trades (Federal Reserve FEDS Note, Aug 2023). This section explains how FX and rates markets are organised (dealers, ECNs, non-bank liquidity providers, the fix), retail FX and CFDs and the rules that cap them (ESMA 2018; the CFTC's retail forex rules), the carry trade and its crashes, Treasury futures and the basis trade, central banks as the market's main event risk, and global macro as a trading style from Soros to the pod shops. It has no worked example (not a ★ section); a small stylized carry table is computed in Python.