Transcript
It’s been a tumultuous year so far, leading to extremely rapidly changing markets. In the first video of our three part series with David Barrett from forex services provider EBC Financial Group, he reflects on the “extraordinary” first six months of 2025, and how EBC’s global clients have been responding to the extreme volatility.
World Finance: Now with ongoing geopolitical tensions and policy shifts across major economies, how is EBC helping clients manage risk in such a fragmented global landscape?
David Barrett: Fragmented – good word. Chaos, another word! The volatility that we’ve seen this year, even just the first six months, has been extraordinary.
Everybody likes moving markets, but I think some of the stuff that we saw, particularly in April and May, was very, very extreme.
I mean I’ve been doing this for an awful long while. There are periods of, you know, extreme volatility that happen. But to have it happen in such a random way that we’ve seen has been very difficult.
There’s a lot of clients that just are not used to that. And are not set up to deal with it. A lot of clients that deal in the markets these days tend to trade in a fairly systematic way – so they’ll have trading algorithms or models that help them trade. Many people have got used to mean reverting markets – so, they sell rallies, wait for it to come, buy dips, wait for it to come back. And clearly we saw such huge moves that actually that kind of trading pattern in the short term particularly at the beginning suffered a lot.
And I think clients have had to adapt to that. We’ve seen change in the way that the flow’s coming through, we’ve seen change in the way that different sectors of client base are reacting to it. And I think it’s our responsibility to give them the tools to be able to do that; but I don’t think anybody should ever look back on the last six months and think that’s normal and acceptable, because it was just off the scale, it really was.
World Finance: So how are traders rethinking risk, and what tools or strategies does EBC advocate for navigating this environment?
David Barrett: I think they do adjust, and I think people do need to take a step back and understand that what we’re seeing isn’t normal and they need to adjust for it.
So, our advice to clients has been: take it back a bit, smaller positions, less leverage, and take your time. Because if you look at the volatility, you look at the extreme moves we’ve had, it’s created a huge amount of opportunity to enter and exit positions at levels and at timing that you never would have thought would be there in ordinary markets.
So our advice has consistently been that you need to be careful, you need to preserve your capital as well as try to increase it. And we believe that the opportunities given by the volatility mean that you can take your time, take a step back, and do it in a more methodical manner than just jumping in with both feet.
World Finance: Have traders been changing their behaviour accordingly?
David Barrett: Yeah I think they have! As we said earlier, I think the obtuse volatility we’ve seen was quite startling for some people. There are people trading the markets that haven’t seen that.
We have clients from a full spectrum. Some of our entities will deal with retail; in the UK we only deal with professional. We have brokers, we have high net worth individuals as well as the retail guys and family offices and so on. So there’s a full breadth.
I think the more professional end understand that this stuff can happen. But there’ll be a lot of young retail traders that wouldn’t have seen this. And hopefully it’s been a good education and a lesson for them, but I do suspect that some of them have kind of had a baptism of fire. April in particular was pretty nasty.
Watch the second part of this interview with David Barrett: EBC UK CEO: Broader instruments like ETFs helping clients better reflect their risk
And the third and final video from this shoot: EBC Financial Group expands family of firms to Australia and Mauritius