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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mandatory SEF Trading Does Not Equal Mandatory Electronic Trading
Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious for some of you, but I’ve had this conversation more than once and felt some clarity was in order here. As we work through the made available to trade (MAT) process, it’s important to reemphasize what actually will be required on mandatory SEF trading day 1. It all […]