As an IB, you may well have clients outside the US. In these cases, the need for non-US price data and currency conversions, time differences, language issues and more can arise. While the language issues may be difficult, and time differences inconvenient, software tools can help in other areas.
As an example, a customer may wish to monitor their US futures position P&L in their own currency. A real time feed into a spreadsheet of both the futures price, say a near month gold contract, and a forward currency quote from a software package would work for this.
As an example, using DTN ProphetX, we set up the quotes below:
The Euro quote is in USD per Euro, and the 3 month forward quotes the number of pips to add to the spot price. The real time data in these quote cells can be linked directly to a spreadsheet, with formulas then applied to provide the June gold contract price in forward valued Euros.
This could be easily set up and totaled across many positions and multiple currencies to keep an up-to-the-minute valuation of an entire portfolio.
John Biesboer is a Senior Technical Account Manager at TelventDTN. His office is in Chicago.