Day in the Life: Benjamin Taieb, foreign exchange options trader

0645 It's time to wake up. I am roused in one of two ways: either my alarm clock goes off or I'm woken up by by three year old son, who wants his morning bottle. It's simply a question of which one gets to me first.

0730 Having fed my son, eaten my own breakfast and got dressed, I leave the house and get the metro to work. .

0800 I arrive at the office and ease myself into the day. This usually involves standing by the desk with a warm coffee while I launch my computer-based risk management and pricing tools. Both are crucial to my job, and are my faithful friends.

As an FX options trader, I trade in options on euros, US dollars and pounds sterling. An option is the right to buy or sell one currency for another at a specific price and a specific date. The right to buy or sell can exist months or even years into the future, which makes my role an interesting one.

It's a question of assessing how macroeconomic and world events will affect foreign exchange prices, and working out what might be a realistic price when the option is exercised.

The risk management and pricing tools help me take everything into account. Nevertheless, trading options and complex products requires a very good background in maths and statistics, because you have to manage a lot of risks at the same time. Trading is a matter of managing and pricing a future risk .Fundamentally, I am a financial market risk manager.

After switching on my computer, I check my existing trading positions against market conditions. Conditions may have changed overnight. Foreign exchange markets are always active, which can make it a bit difficult to wind down and forget about work, even when you should be asleep!

0830 Affter listening to the morning meeting and gaining an update on overnight events on Wall Street and Tokyo, I'm nearly ready to start trading. The new market parameters, such as spot foreign exchange prices and price volatility, are already visible on the screen of my computer terminal.

I am a proprietary trader, which means that I work in close contact with our brokers, who let me know all the supply and demand requirements of banks in the world

0900From now on it's a matter of buying and selling options according to what we expect to happen in the market over the coming days and months. Right now, for example, we are very bearish regarding the value of the dollar against the euro: we think it's likely to fall. We therefore try to build an options portfolio that will increase in value if this happens.

1100 When the chaos of the early morning is over, I move on to the other aspect of my job: working with the sales team. Together with the salespeople, I help devise strategies for the bank's customers who want to hedge their exposure to foreign currencies. This is a very interesting part of my day.

Every customer is different, and we try to build products that will fit their specific needs. As a result, the customers benefit directly from our know-how about deriviatives instruments, which can be more rewarding than simply using that knowledge to make money on the markets.

1230Time is generally tight, so I usually have a quick and light lunch at my desk.

1400 Today, the early afternoon is again devoted to trading. We monitor the positions we have taken continuously, in case anything changes which would make them inappropriate. For example, if something happened to make the dollar rise against the euro, that would be counter to our expectations and could be bad news!

At the same time, we quote options prices to our customers and follow the interbank market.

1500 This is an important time of the day. The US markets are about to open and we need to forecast their potential impact on the foreign exchange prices that have been established during morning trading in Europe.

Nowadays prices in all markets are similar. This means that to really understand what's happening in foreign exchange you have to follow events globally, not just those in your own market.

1600 At 4pm Paris time and 10am New York time, we reach the expiry point, which means the owners of options that expire today have to decide whether to use their right to buy or sell the currencies at the pre-agreed 'strike' price.

If they don't use it, they have to forget that right forever. If they are buying and spot or current price is higher than the strike price, it makes sense for the owner to exercise the option: they can buy the currency at a discount, and then go on to sell it at a profit.

But if they are buying and the spot price is lower the strike price, the option owner will make a loss and the owner might as well forget about it. Sometimes the spot, or current, market, has a price exactly the same as the strike price, which always seems a bit of a coincidence.

1645 With the expiry point past, we try to increase our pricing skills by studying and developing new models. This means focusing on risk management and adjusting the computer risk matrices which help us to calculate how our portfolio will perform under certain economic scenarios. If necessary, we change the parameters to rebalance the model.

1800 We report the day's profit and our trading positions to the boss, along with some explanations. Then we send our orders to the New York and Singaporean desks. We also leave them instructions to wake us up in case anything momentous happens overnight.

1830I'm usually exhausted at this time of the day. But from time to time on my way home I try to drop by the football field for an hour or so.

2300 I try not to get in bed too late, so that I'm refreshed for the next battle tomorrow.