One of the major themes for 2023 is the emphasis on multi-asset trading and the focus on efficiency and scalability across regions and countries. In the past, a trader focused on a single asset class such as equities or bonds, whereas today with the migration to electronic trading, the desk can automate workflows and manage executions across all asset classes.
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.
As we look back on this year, topics such as institutional adoption of digital asset trading, European trading in response to geopolitical risk, and the SEC’s plans to revamp U.S. stock trading rules dominated the headlines. In 2022, we covered those topics and much more including the growing sophistication of AlgoWheel, and the evolution of the buy-side fixed income EMS.
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.
One of the biggest possible reforms would be a requirement for retail brokers to route individual orders to buy or sell stocks into a transparent “auction process” for matching customer orders, rather than sending them to wholesale market makers for execution on off-exchange platforms.
It’s not clear whether the stablecoin crisis will cause institutions to scale back their plans for trading and investing in cryptocurrencies or digital securities.
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.
If PFOF is potentially curtailed or prohibited, it could impact retail investors that have benefited from commission-free trading as well as the wholesale market-maker model of matching retail orders through internalization.
The fixed-income trading space has exploded with innovation from electronic trading protocols to new pricing services. In recent years, execution management systems (EMSs) have expanded their functionality in fixed income to provide more efficiency and price transparency to the buy side. Now a global conversation is taking place about the regulation of fixed-income electronic trading …
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.
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