If you work in institutional finance you’ve heard talk of market structure. Not only are there entire conferences dedicated to the topic, but most of the participants at those conferences— banks, asset managers, researchers—send their heads of market structure to speak. Commonly used in economics to describe the interconnectedness of and interaction between the buyers […]
Category: Commentary
SEF volumes died last week – so when and where will they return?
Turned out the first week of mandatory SEF trading was a Big Bang, just in the wrong direction. Reported SEF volumes for interest rate swaps fell off a cliff for the week of February 17th, dropping 64% (revised down slightly as new data became available) from the 2014 weekly average SEF traded volume (thanks as […]
SEF Day 1: A Big Deal but Not a Big Bang
Tuesday February 18th is certainly a big deal. Requiring swaps to trade on registered platforms was one of the primary tenets of derivatives reform since shortly after the Lehman bankruptcy, and finally the day has arrived. This is the first regulatory driven change since 2008 that will deeply impact the way sell side and buy […]
SEFs – nothing short of technology marvels
Its true. If you step back and think about it for a minute, the work carried out over the past four years to create an electronic swaps market almost from scratch is pretty amazing. PR Metia just released their FinTech Insight 2014 report which includes commentary from industry analysts on all things financial technology – […]
A Path Forward for Prop Traders in the Swaps Market
The CFTC is great at sending emails out at inopportune times. In this case it was the 13 no-action letters sent between December 20th and December 31th while most of the financial world was trying to take a deep breath and enjoy some time off. Apparently Wall Street gets more vacation time than the Commission. […]
Greenwich Associate’s Market Structure Trends to Watch in 2014
The year 2013 will likely go down as the year of mandatory clearing. Once ignored by eager financial market professionals as boring back-office stuff, collateral management, credit limits and all other things clearing stood front and center in 2013 as swaps went from a 10-day clearing cycle to a 10-second clearing cycle. Given the progress […]
Top Posts of 2013 from Kevin on the Street
With 2013 just about behind us, I thought it would be fun to look back at the most read posts on Kevin on the Street since my joining Greenwich Associates roughly 5 months ago. While the history books will look at 2013 as the year that central clearing took hold, the latter half of the […]
Some SEF Trading Certainty – Finally!
Who would have guessed that Black Friday would have turned out to be a big day for SEF trading. Both Javelin and Tradeweb resubmit their MAT filings, both scaling back the number of products made available for trading. This is a big deal for a few reasons. First of all, comment letters apparently work. As […]
Impartial access encourages, but does not require, an agency model
In the past I’ve spoken about buy side incentives for using an agency model – chief among them the reluctance or inability to navigate the slew of legal documents an institutional investor would need to sign in order to gain access to the needed SEFs. (Other incentives are discussed in a good post on the […]
Impartial Access: The CFTC Isn’t Messing Around This Time
The CFTC issued a slew of new guidance and rules last week, two of them particularly interesting and impactful. First was the rule that requires clearinghouses to have credit facilities available to back up all margin posted in US Treasuries. I (and pretty much every one else in the market) think this is ridiculous. If […]