FlexAdvantage Blog

Will the trading desk of the future hook into online marketplaces that trade fractionalized shares of real estate, or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on art, sports or music?

By Ivy Schmerken Senior buy-side traders offered differing views on the definition of high-touch and low-touch trading in foreign exchange (FX) at a roundtable in May, shedding light on efforts to rank their brokers and incorporate data analytics into their decisions. Discussing their usage of FX electronic trading protocols and algorithms for “chunkier trades,” buy-side …

By Ivy Schmerken The pandemic has accelerated the trend toward adopting cloud-based market data services and computationally intensive risk analytics, according to analysts on recent capital markets webinars. Despite past concerns over latency and security with the public cloud, many banks and asset managers are using cloud-based market data services and data analytics for historical …

Now experts are saying that ‘inaccessible liquidity’ is costing institutional investors three times as much in transaction costs, and it’s affecting the calculations made by their algorithms such as volume weighted average price (VWAP) and percentage of volume (POV), which rely on overall volumes.

With everyone seeking up-to-the minute data, analysts and investment managers utilized foot traffic from geolocation data to quantify retail sales and disruptions to the global supply chain. The rise of new marketplaces should remove some of the onerous work of sourcing, collecting, and normalizing data feeds from multiple vendors.

The rise in off-exchange market share fueled by retail trading, liquidity aggregation on fixed-income trading desks, and how options traders adjusted to all-electronic trading during the pandemic were among the most popular topics. On the technology front, readers were drawn to the adoption of AI and machine learning by algo trading desks, ATSs and Algo Wheels.

Another trend has been the mergers and acquisitions of exchanges and bond trading platforms, and joint ventures between fintech companies and fixed-income venues. Exchanges have been acquiring fixed-income venues over the past few years, which is also driving the consolidation of liquidity pools and e-trading protocols.

Equity market participants are learning about new exchanges, order types, and periodic auctions bringing innovation and competition to the equity trading landscape. Citing the concept of “inaccessible liquidity,” asset managers pointed to the surge of retail trading by mom and pop investors whose orders are executed off-exchange on private platforms.  

While adhering to the CAT reporting timeline, sell-side firms are responsible for monitoring the CAT Reporter Portal and for fixing errors and rejects that come back from FINRA. So far, experts say the industry is doing very well with their data submissions. But error rates could escalate as the industry tackles more thorny order events and submits higher volumes of data.

Aggregation tools that pull in direct pricing streams and RFQs into an execution management system (EMS) or order management system (OMS) are becoming a critical part of creating a composite view of the fixed-income market.