Who writes the forex analysis you read every day?
The daily roundups quote 21 banks and research houses. Who is each one, where is it from, and why does it have a view on that currency and not another?
You open the morning roundup and read "according to MUFG", "per TD Securities", "OCBC points to". They are names without faces: they show up, say something about the yen or gold, and vanish until tomorrow.
This piece puts a face to the 21 names that appear in our texts. It is not a directory of banks — it answers why that bank has a view on that currency.
Why do bank names show up in a daily roundup?
Large banks run currency desks that publish notes almost daily for their clients: where they see a pair, what they expect from a rate meeting, which risk they are watching. Those notes reach the wires and the financial portals, and from there they reach a roundup like ours.
They are not neutral forecasts and they bind nobody. They are the view of a house that also trades that market, which is why we name who says it instead of presenting it as fact.
What this piece does not give you
There is no accuracy ranking. We keep no score of who called the yen right, no per-house track record exists here, and building one properly would take work we have not done.
Nor is it a recommendation to read some and skip others. It is a map, so that when you read "according to Rabobank" you know whose words those are.
Asia and the Pacific
This block carries the most weight in our roundups for a scheduling reason: by the time we publish, the Asian session has closed and these are the houses that read it live.
| House | Where it is from | Why it appears |
|---|---|---|
| UOB | Singapore | Ranges on the Chinese yuan and the Singapore dollar |
| OCBC | Singapore | Asian currencies as a bloc — baht, won, Singapore dollar |
| DBS | Singapore | South Korean data and its rate path |
| MUFG | Japan | The yen, and the Bank of Japan |
| Nomura | Japan | Its euro-area team and the European Central Bank |
| ANZ | Australia and New Zealand | Its Business Outlook, a New Zealand business confidence survey |
| Westpac | Australia | Its Leading Index, an Australian leading indicator |
| Standard Chartered | United Kingdom, with its business in Asia | China forecasts |
Two of these enter through a number, not a view. ANZ and Westpac publish their own surveys and indices, so when we quote them we are quoting a figure of theirs, not their analysis. The distinction is worth keeping: a survey can be checked, a forecast cannot.
And Nomura breaks the geographic pattern. It is Japanese, yet in our texts it almost always talks about the euro.
Europe
| House | Where it is from | Why it appears |
|---|---|---|
| ING | Netherlands | Korean won, Mexican peso, broad flows |
| ABN AMRO | Netherlands | The euro and diverging policy paths |
| Rabobank | Netherlands | Gold, central-bank demand, de-dollarization |
| Commerzbank | Germany | Euro, Chinese yuan and crude |
| Société Générale | France | Yen and yuan |
| HSBC | United Kingdom | The dollar index and gold |
| Barclays | United Kingdom | Forecasts on the dollar, Canadian dollar, yen and Swiss franc |
The acronyms in this block mislead. At HSBC, ING and ABN AMRO the letters are no longer a live abbreviation: they are the firm's legal name, and what once sat behind them — Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Internationale Nederlanden Groep, Algemene Bank Nederland plus Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank — is history, not an expansion you need to carry around.
North America
| House | Where it is from | Why it appears |
|---|---|---|
| TD Securities | Canada | Gold and precious metals, yuan, won |
| Scotiabank | Canada | Yen, EUR/USD, sterling and the Canadian dollar |
| BNY | United States | The dollar, the Federal Reserve, flows |
| Goldman Sachs | United States | Trade recommendations and US inflation |
| Citi | United States | Its Mexican unit's survey on Banxico and USD/MXN |
| BofA | United States | Currency reads, the yen in particular |
TD Securities and Scotiabank are the two Canadians, but they do different jobs. TD Securities shows up mostly on gold — it is the house we quote when the metal runs into a ceiling — while Scotiabank is the most generalist name in the corpus, reading the yen one day and sterling the next.
Two of the initials in this block need unpacking: BNY is Bank of New York Mellon and BofA is Bank of America.
Sometimes we quote the person, not just the house: Derek Halpenny signs much of what we carry from MUFG, and Geoff Yu does the same at BNY. A personal name appears because the original note carried it.
Who do we quote most?
Counted by story rather than by article, so the Spanish-English pair does not count twice, the split across the blog looks like this:
| House | Stories |
|---|---|
| TD Securities | 10 |
| Scotiabank | 9 |
| BNY | 8 |
| MUFG | 7 |
| Commerzbank | 7 |
| UOB | 6 |
| OCBC · ING · Rabobank · Société Générale | 5 |
| Barclays | 4 |
| Nomura | 3 |
| HSBC · ABN AMRO · ANZ · Goldman Sachs | 2 |
| DBS · Citi · BofA · Westpac · Standard Chartered | 1 |
The tail is long and flat: of the 21 houses, nine appear in two stories or fewer. There is no fixed handful of sources — there is a core of five or six and a drip that depends on who published something relevant that day.
Two that appear for two different reasons
Two names on this list are not always the research house.
ING bought Barings for one pound in February 1995, after one trader's hidden positions turned out to be worth more than the whole bank. That story is told in the piece on Nick Leeson.
Société Générale discovered in January 2008 that a trader had built unauthorised positions worth €49.9 billion. That is the Kerviel affair.
If you run into either name, check the context before assuming which one is meant.
And the ones that are not banks
Not everything we quote is a currency desk. FXStreet appears in 24 stories, more than any bank on this list, and Reuters, Bloomberg, Investing and Myfxbook turn up regularly.
The difference matters: a news outlet reports what happened or what someone else said; a research house argues a view and has money in the market it is arguing about. When you read an attribution, the first useful question is which of the two you are looking at.
How to use this when you read a roundup
Three questions, in this order.
- Who is saying it? A Singaporean house on Asian currencies is on home ground; the same house on the Swiss franc, less so.
- Is it a number or a view? ANZ's Business Outlook is a published survey. Barclays seeing the franc at 0.90 is a forecast.
- Is there more than one voice? When two houses say opposite things about the same pair — which happens often — that is information in itself: the market has not made up its mind.
For the other side of the same problem, what actually moves the money rather than who has a view on it, there are following the money and the COT report.
