Today (Sep 17, 2013) I’m moderating a swap futures panel at the Institutional Investor Fixed Income Forum event in Westchester County. For those of you keeping score at home that’s two swap futures panels in two days. We have a great lineup (Citi, Vanguard and CME) but will be one less than expected. Our CFTC […]
Category: Commentary
How Capitalism and Technology Can Fix the Equity Market
Free-market capitalism will ultimately lead any marketplace to its ideal state. Over the past half-decade this principle has driven my hypothesis that regulators should not try to stymie trading strategy and technology innovation, but should instead follow a principles-based approach (see the CFTC c. 2007) that prevents fraud while still allowing competition to carry on […]
Determining if SEF Aggregation Really Matters
This post also published at TabbFORUM.com Regulations will have a significant impact on how SEF aggregators function and how widely these aggregators will be adopted by various market participants. Some of the most contentious rule proposals are those that will have the greatest impact on liquidity fragmentation. They include the 15-second rule, the ability to […]
A (Greek) Default By Any Other Name
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 […]
Visualizing the Stock Market with StockTouch
As a research analyst I don’t do much in the way of product reviews. Sure we compare and contrast business models, but in most cases we stop short of saying which product is better. This is because we’re not actually users of those institutionally focused products. Well in this case it’s different. I recently began […]
Who Needs Fiber Optics when you have Microwaves?
In 2010 I wrote about the value of shaving off microseconds on long distance routes for high speed trading strategies. Spread Networks proved that value by creating and selling its direct link between NY and Chicago, cutting off roughly 3 milliseconds from the roundtrip. I spend a lot of time looking at the maps back […]
Futures On Credit-Default Swaps Seen As Natural Evolution (Wall Street Journal)
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. […]
Dealer with a Capital "D"
Competition among swaps dealers young and old will be fierce, yet what constitutes a “dealer” still remains unclear. Defining “dealer” is important because those who register as Swaps Dealers will face tougher scrutiny-including more reporting and higher capital requirements-from regulators. And since the CFTC recently passed a few rules relating to Swap Dealer registration, I […]
The Swap Execution Facility Twitter Awards
Happy New Year! Let’s start off the year with something a little less serious than overly burdensome margin requirements and order interaction rules. I’ve written before about how Twitter can in fact be a very useful business tool. Not for telling people what you had for lunch, but for finding and consuming interesting bits of […]
The Kevin on the Street Top Ten Stories of 2011
I officially launched Kevin on the Street in the spring of 2010, so 2011 was its first full year of operation. Not like the world (or the web) needs another top ten list, but in digging through my Google Analytics account I thought it was pretty interesting to see what stories garnered the most interest. […]