FX Hall of Famer Ogg Heads to the Beach

David Ogg has announced he is stepping down from his position as chief revenue officer at Bosonic and heading to semi-retirement, thus bringing, if not a full stop, then a punctuation mark, to a 40-year career in FX, and most latterly crypto.

Although he says he will be open to consultancy and advisory work, Ogg says in a post on social media, he is now “going to enjoy the fruits of my labour”.

Ogg spent 18 years as a spot FX trader in New York, being one of, if not the, leading liquidity provider in USD/CHF and USD/DEM while at Credit Suisse and Dresdner (he also had spells as HSBC and Lehman Brothers). Towards the end of his trading career he was running the FX trading and sales business, when he came up with the idea of an FX ECN that gave access, for a fee, to the buy side. In 1999 he was a co-founder of Hotspot FX, now Cboe FX, which went live in 2000 as the first institutional ECN in the FX industry.

In 2004, Ogg left Hotspot to create and build Lava FX, an ECN that pioneered order types previously only available on selected single dealer platforms. Part of that work was the Lava FX OMS, which formed the backbone of Citi’s order management offering for several years, as well as being deployed by other banks around the world.

After the broader Lava business was acquired by Citi in 2004 (just after the launch of the Lava FX platform), the technology was used to underpin Citi’s Velocity single dealer platform. In 2010, Lava FX was sold by Citi to FXall, where it became the firm’s Accelor platform ahead of the acquisition of FXall by Thomson Reuters.

Another new firm was launched in 2010, Ogg Trading, which offered a dark pool ECN – one of the original ideas at Lava FX – in partnership with Bloomberg. In 2018, the firm was sold to what was OTCXN, which introduced Ogg to the Crypto world. OTCXN, now Bosonic, provides clearing and settlement services to the crypto industry.

As his track record clearly indicates, Ogg leveraged his extensive experience as a trader to build applications that traders would actually used – and to this writer personally, he was an “ideas man” who often came up with new products that were well ahead of their time. From the trading desk to the era of technology innovation, Dave Ogg was at the forefront of developments, as highlighted by his being elected to the Profit & Loss FX Hall of Fame in 2012. I, for one, will miss his inputs, but wish him a very happy retirement and express the hope that we will get to sit down again for a chat in the near future.

Colin Lambert