Citi Rides Hedge Fund Volatility to Trillion-Dollar Growth in FX

Flavio Figueiredo’s flight had just lifted off the ground in London when President Donald Trump announced sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, setting off the biggest daily electronic trading volume ever seen by the Citigroup Inc. executive’s global foreign-exchange team.

Such unexpected bouts of market turmoil — as well as the bank’s investments in talent and technology — have helped drive a trillion-dollar increase in FX volumes traded by Citigroup’s hedge fund clients. In this year’s first four months, the firm saw such business jump about 23% to a record $6.1 trillion from a year earlier.