FT Alphaville " Another day, another SNB rumour Swiss franc traders have been pretty bored of late, with the euro/Swiss franc flatlining for months. But it seems they've had some rare excitement this week: someone out there is buying as many euros against the franc as traders care to offload. Naturally, everyone is assuming this buyer is the SNB - in disguise. And the rumoured identity of the mystery intermediary is something of a surprise: Rabobank. Traders are rival banks insist the prime brokerage arm of this Dutch cooperative bank has hoovered up as much as €10bn over the past week alone, although there was no confirmation of this from Rabo at pixel time. The SNB has said since September it stands ready to buy as many euros as needed in order to defend the Swiss franc at SFr1.20 against the euro. But it hasn't been clear that it's done anything as yet. Big bids have sat in the system - the EBS platform used by FX traders - at the floor, and those have been assumed to be from the SNB, which usually comes into the market directly. Because people generally believe the SNB will defend the floor, no one has really tried to test it - the supposed "break" in the floor a few weeks ago was simply due to smaller banks not trading at the best price available, the SNB said at the time. The bidder this week has been buying at SFr1.2010, traders say. But because the bids are through a prime brokerage arm, they're harder to monitor - they could be on behalf of one client, or 10. Whatever the case, it's been welcome news this week for hedge funds bored of taking long euro/franc positions who have just sold into the bid. If the SNB is behind it, the question now is whether it will show up in their next release on the subject, scheduled for June 7. This entry was posted by Alice Ross on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 17:46 and is filed under Capital markets. Tagged with foreign exchange, snb, Swiss franc.