The Wall Street Journal has a great featured piece today on the importance of the sales trader, which is something we at Greenwich have been out talking about quite a bit over the last few months. The WSJ story features our latest equity research (although the direct quote was unfortunately cut by the editors – sorry… Read More »
Back in October I wrote about the impact of an impeding Greek default on the CDS market. I concluded that in the shadow of Dodd-Frank, the decision on whether the Greek bailout triggered a CS payout was a minimal consequence. With ISDA’s announcement that the European Central Bank’s fix to the Greek bond crisis will… Read More »
If Congress really had its way (well, the Democrats anyway) than all swaps would have been forced to look and trade like futures. If you’re reading this blog than you know that would be a classic square peg, round hole. Case in point: Eurex launched iTraxx futures some years back and no liquidity every developed.… Read More »
It seemed like the CFTC’s meeting yesterday (Dec 12th) would be a big one; we’d find out the size of a block trade and in doing so get some insight into how truly electronic the swaps market would become. Â Unfortunately, the can has been kicked down the road again. Â Instead we have a… Read More »
The slow regulatory process has its first known victim. As soon as Dodd-Frank made swap execution facilities official, entrepeurial swaps traders everywhere thought they better hurry up and start one. But as we’re seeing only those with deep enough pockets to keep operating for months (or years) with virtual no profit until regulations are in… Read More »
This story was posted last week, and although its a bit odd to repost the story that quoted Kevin on the Street, I thought the author Katy Burne did a great job of explaining how the providers of CDS market data do what they do. The decision to review alleged preferential treatment of certain vendors… Read More »
FX swaps are exempt from new derivatives regulations in the US. Not really a surprise. This language was in an earlier version of Dodd-Frank and the geopolitical issues surrounding FX make it a very hard to thing to regulate by a single country. Not to mention the usual argument that FX functioned fine during the… Read More »
Execution and clearing mandates for OTC derivative trades are still nearly a year a way by my estimates, but the Street is already getting ready. While Deutsche Bank and Bluemountain Capital executed CDS trades through Tradeweb and cleared via the CME and ICE, Barclays was busy rolling out its new electronic CDS trading product for… Read More »