Category: Greenwich Associates Research

What is Market Structure, And Why You Should Care

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 […]

The US Invasion of European Fixed Income

Capital is expensive and getting more expensive.  But the problem is proving a much harder one to manage in Europe, with European banks continuing to deleverage and already complying with the principles of Basel III while US banks have their capital houses (relatively) in order.  The impact of this dichotomy is broad, but one impact […]

Electronic trading of bonds is growing – sort of…

We all know that the massive reduction in dealer inventories and the cost of capital has had a huge negative impact on liquidity in the corporate bond market.  While the primary market has helped soften the blow, that crutch isn’t going to be here for long as rates start to rise over the next few […]

Fixed Income Desks Spending More on Technology. Surprised? Me neither.

We spoke to just under 500 portfolio managers and traders globally to see what they’re doing with and what they think about OMSs, EMSs and TCA platforms for Equities, FX and Fixed Income.  This is not a space of dramatic year on year change given the maturity of the providers and their products.  However the […]

Why Regulatory Changes Will Drive FX Trading Volume to Futures

Its been my experience that many in the market are ignoring FX in the global derivatives reform debate, thinking of them as broadly exempt from new rules.  This view is a bit of a red herring.  Our latest research report digs into the regulations set to hit the FX derivatives market and the impact they […]

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 […]

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 […]

Greenwich Research: Derivatives Rules to Disrupt Move of FX to Multi-Dealer Platforms

We just published some new research that looks at buy side use of single-dealer platforms and multi-dealer platforms in the FX market.  Our historical usage data shows MDPs overtaking SDPs slow but surely – but new regulations (most notably footnote 88) are temporarily reversing that trend.  Particular interesting (to me at least) in this report […]

Greenwich Fixed Income Market Structure Event: Liquidity, SEFs and Technology to Manage the Change

Given all of the research we have going on here at Greenwich and all of the regulatory mess going on in the world, we thought it a good time to set up a webinar to review both.  I’ll go through some of my recent research here at Greenwich – credit liquidity alternatives, trading technology spend, […]