What are the top market structure issues for sell-side firms in 2023? With the new year off to a fast start, brokerage firms are facing a variety of evolving issues that could impact their trading businesses. On the horizon are proposed regulations to reform U.S. equity trading, increased best execution obligations, innovations in ATSs, 24-hour trading, and shortening the settlement cycle to T+1.
At the Security Traders Association (STA) 89th Annual National Market Structure Conference held in Washington DC in October, brokerage executives reacted to the concept of auctions as well as other ideas on SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s agenda to revamp equity market structure. But the industry’s top wholesalers and brokerage executives speaking at STA emphasized that the stock market is functioning well for retail investors and cautioned against making a litany of changes that could lead to worse results.
Eyeing this demand for private equity, major broker-dealers, wholesale market makers and global exchanges are striking deals and forming new platforms to bring automation to private securities trading.
Dark pools catering to institutions have evolved with innovative methods of matching orders and faster matching engines to avoid moving the price after the trade. It’s also a sign of the intense competition brewing between off-exchange venues seeking to sign up brokers and institutions.
With the hiring of data scientists, advances in cloud computing, and access to open source frameworks for training machine learning models, AI is transforming the trading desk. Already the largest banks have rolled out self-learning algorithms for equities trading.
A FINRA working paper has raised concerns about broker order routing to affiliated alternative trading systems (ATSs), shedding light on order routing decisions and potential conflicts that can impact execution quality. Can a higher level of scrutiny by regulators be on the way?
The SEC’s new proposed rules on transparency in alternative trading systems are going to shine a light on the operations of dark pools, ensuring fair access to information for all market participants.
Buy side firms have shown signs of impatience with U.S. equity market structure. While they are leery of radical reforms, institutions have seeded a number of trading venues lately.
"*" indicates required fields