FX Sales Trader

About The Role

FX Sales Trader - Emerging Markets (EM)
The client
United Kingdom (remote)

My client is looking for a FX Sales Trader to join their fast-growing multi-asset trading desk which sits at the heart of the client's cross-border payments infrastructure. This exciting new role spans FX spot, forwards, and swaps across African and Emerging Markets (EM) corridors, with the mandate growing into fixed income and money-market instruments as the desk expands its product offering.

Key Responsibilities:

- **FX execution across EM corridors** — sourcing and executing spot, forward, and swap transactions across African and other EM currency pairs and adjacent corridors.
- **LP relationship management** — holding live conversations across the liquidity provider set; maintaining the relationships through which prices and flow can be sourced under pressure; treating the network as the client's institutional asset.
- **Market intelligence and desk analytics** — turning corridor data, customer flow, and LP behaviour into actionable desk intelligence; building and maintaining analytical tools to track spreads, regime changes, and counterparty positioning.
- **Regulatory and capital control navigation** — understanding what capital controls, central bank interventions, and jurisdiction-specific settlement requirements mean in practice; staying ahead of regulatory signals in the corridors you cover.
- **Risk and counterparty management** — thinking about exposure at the desk level, not just the trade level; assessing counterparties on financial health, regulatory standing, and behaviour under stress; surfacing concerns before they become problems.
- **Post trade** — owning reconciliation, and post-trade hygiene, not as a back-office task; escalating unusual signal early with calibrated judgement.

Key Requirements:

- **Demonstrable EM or frontier FX experience** — two to five years working African or other EM corridors in a markets role; the market quirks, capital controls, and counterparty dynamics must be the substance of prior work.
- **Multi-asset fluency** — working knowledge of FX spot, forwards, swaps, and options; working knowledge of bond pricing and money-market instruments in EM markets; able to reason from first principles about instruments you haven’t personally traded.
- **Quantitative capability** — comfortable with statistics and time-series analysis applied to live trading work; able to munge data in Python, R, or VBA to build a chart, run a back-test, or calculate a metric without it being a project.
- **Corridor-level market knowledge** — treat distinct EM currencies as distinct markets, not flavours of the same; understands the EUR peg mechanics for CFA currencies, the CBN-managed float for NGN, and the regulatory regimes that govern each.
- **Risk instinct** — thinks about exposure at the desk level; understands settlement-window credit risk, counterparty concentration, and the risk surface that comes with own-account trading.
- **Operational discipline** — on the desk when the market opens; owns reconciliation and post-trade hygiene without being asked; escalates with signal, not noise.
- **Integrity under pressure** — can hold honesty and stakeholder management in tension when a position is under duress.