EPTA News
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Market Liquidity: Favouring Electronic Markets Over Pit Trading
Those who think that the tech race towards electronic trading has led to illiquid markets have forgotten what the world looked like only 15 years ago. Having traded the markets since 1985, I would like to explain what market liquidity actually meant in the pre-electronic days and what it means in the world of electronic trading. During the 1987 October crash, Black Monday, I was a junior trader in government bonds and futures. Black Monday was not a crash which was over in seconds or minutes; no, the world stopped turning actually for days. The mini crash of 1989 had a similar pattern. Chernobyl 1986, Gorbachev crisis in 1991 and UK election day in 1992, were all similar liquidity gap events seen by market traders. The beauty of those days (the late 80s) for a trader, was that markets were very often in a ‘fast market’ condition. This meant that one was able to trade at any price and all rules were thrown overboard until the board officials were able to control the pit again. Without computers, we simply could not deal with the enormous amount of activity in the markets at those times and simply stopped (or delayed) sending price information out, not just for seconds, but minutes and even (during the week of Black Monday) days. Clearers had backlogs to clients for days. What investors, customers, institutions looked at in those days were screen prices on systems like Reuters or Bloomberg: feeds fed by the voice of the official. If the official did not yell a price in the mic, the data group would not enter a price, and the world would never see this price. Under fast markets no prices were entered and the screen would just read ‘fast’ (if you were lucky). Future and option prices on screen were seen as tradeable prices and in slow markets they may have been pretty close to the truth. In fast markets they were inaccurate and it was not possible to trade the price indicated on the Reuters screen. Yet the world still thought this was the correct price. Being in the pit, one cannot keep buying or selling an instrument, so traders would hedge their positions. Hundreds of times I have been in situations where there was simply no bid or offer in the instrument to hedge in. The signal from a broker out of the futures pit simply stated, ‘no bid, no bid’, yet all the screens where showing a bid or an offer. Was this liquidity? The world clearly thought it was, but we all knew there was panic on the floor and you were lucky to trade one lot. I remember the morning after the Tories won the elections in 1992 (UK). The markets opened early that day. The FTSE 100 future was quoted with a spread of 50 points and traded about 250 points up at some stage in the first few minutes of trading. With 5 to 10 futures you moved the price down or up 50 points. Was that a liquid market? In cash markets it was no different. On the LSE, after the Big Bang in 1986, you had to call the market maker on SEAQ and ask politely how much he would bid or offer in a stock and one could then trade with the market maker. The reality was that in volatile markets, or when there was unexpected news in that specicfic stock or sector, the phone was not answered at all untill the bid-ask price had moved. I remember the day one bank froze the FTSE 100 index during an expiration by moving all the prices of stocks to one side, so the bid was higher than the offer shown on screen in all stocks, and fixed the expiry level. Trading with the bank was not possible as their phones happened to be down. After 20 minutes they changed their quotes and all of a sudden they answered the phone again. Call that liquidity? In the French pit on the MONEP in those days it was not called market abuse if a trade happened at for example 4 francs, whilst someone else was bidding 5 francs. The excuse was clearly, “oh, I did not hear you.” Many officials were corrupt and did not intervene. For years customer orders were executed this way. For years the regulator was hard to be found and was not even interested in protecting the pricing for the end customer. I wish Mr. Barnier had been involved then. Was this liquidity? Thanks to electronic trading, the dark days, described above, are over. It seems people often forget how fortunate we are today. The information we are dealing with on exchanges and platforms is publicly available, not just to members of the exchange in a millisecond. The information is stored and kept for potential market abuse analyses and other surveillance analyses. It is not possible to trade lower than a shown bid or higher than a shown offer. The best price always wins and is filled first. What you see is what you get because you can trade it. No fake liquidity is shown. Be glad we live in 2014! Critics of electronic trading often mention that we deal in too many decimals. Yes, we are able to work through computers in 3 or 4 decimals and can improve our price many times per second. We also decrease the difference between the bid and ask price as we control our risk better and the trading and clearing fees have come down. We can now see all the price changes, the real order size and actually really trade on them; this was not possible before electronic trading. Yes, today you need engineers, analysts, high-end computers and data space with reliable data lines (no internet connection) to analyze the flow of public data. And I DO believe we can still improve things: the systems malfunctions, glitches, and so on. The industry as a whole has a job to do, including exchanges and platforms. The fact remains that current markets are a huge improvement over the past and it is the responsibility of all participants to strive towards continuous improvements. Before, the physical strength of a trader, his voice, his spot in the pit and his brain alone were the key ingredients. You decide yourself which world is better for price transparency and liquidity. The views expressed in this blog post are the personal opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the FIA European Principal Traders Association or the Futures Industry Association.
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Market liquidity - favouring electronic markets over pit trading
Those who think that the tech race towards electronic trading has led to illiquid markets have forgotten what the world looked like only 15 years ago.
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MiFID Congratulations on Your Sixth Anniversary
It occurred to me recently that there has not been any news coverage of the 6th anniversary of MiFID, which was implemented in Europe on November 1st 2007. The pregnancy of MiFID took many many years: some claim as many as 14. Today we are awaiting a new member of the family: MiFID 2. The exact date of birth is yet to be confirmed, but Father Ferber is warming up the towels as we speak. Before we welcome MiFID 2 I would like to congratulate MiFID for the outstanding years we’ve had. Why, you may ask? Before 2007 we lived in a world of incumbent exchanges, incumbent clearers and lots of different market participants. Some were providing liquidity through passive pricing; others provided liquidity by sending active orders to be filled directly. Volumes were high and we did come close to the limits of both clearers and technology’s ability to handle transactions. All these transactions came at a very high trading cost, but MiFID changed this. When I say congratulating MiFID, I really mean the EU Commission, the EU regulators, the Exchanges and many other organizations that made it a success. The magic word for MiFID was ‘competition’. MiFID opened up real competition between Exchanges. CHI X was launched pre-MiFID with the help of Instinet, Fortis Bank and two algo trading firms (nowadays called HFT firms). The firms were able to quote competitive prices for the main European cash equity markets, all through the use of technology. Combined with a very low cost of trading they were able to compete from day one with the prices on Euronext, LSE and Xetra. This caused the bid ask spread to reduce significantly. This success was not only caused by MiFID. MiFID did help the process significantly, but LSE had tried a similar initiative in 2004 called DTS, which never became a real success. There were two reasons for this: first, the technology provided by LSE was no better than the exchanges were using at the time; second, the costs to use the Central Clearer were the same under DTS as the exchanges. When we created CHI-X we learnt from these mistakes: costs had to come down significantly, not only the exchange fees, but also post-trade fees, membership fees and connectivity fees. Fortis Bank started up EMCF and this entity offered clearing so cheaply, that this really paid off in narrowing the spread. Instead of paying 65 cents per transaction they started off with 30 cents and on a sliding scale pricing tariff were able to clear transactions towards 10 cents. The link to CHI-X for EMCF was the main artery. The challenge came on how to connect to other markets and clearers, but helped with the best technology, the correct market model and costs, (and timed well by the regulators to instill MiFID) competition was born. We all owe MiFID a big thank you for this. MiFID was born and helped the cash equity markets to compete. Without an innovative central clearer we would never have been able to give MiFID this credit. Competition in equity markets is actually not between exchanges (at least not directly). Competition in equity markets can only happen if clearers have lines to each other and the clearer has access to the feed from an exchange. Quite clearly CHI-X (and later Turquoise) gained a lot of market share and became the dominant markets; not in market share necessarily but in liquidity, pricing and technological innovation. The incumbent clearers and exchanges learned from this and adapted by opening their lines to the newcomers. This was the much needed final step forward for competition. MiFID did not just create the innovation in cash equity markets. Many exchanges also run derivatives markets, so the effect coming from innovation in the equity markets also flooded into the derivatives markets place. Technology was improved, but prices stayed the same because of a lack of competition at central clearer level. We are still in this position today and MiFID 2 does not seem to adequately tackle this. The life cycle of the markets determined that once we had competition, we also got fragmentation (as a sort of ‘afterbirth’). You simply cannot avoid it. And it should not have been avoided. The market itself will determine what is next. After a few years of battling, and many new initiatives mergers and takeovers, we will see the much needed consolidating phase. MiFID had one flaw, and we will unfortunately have to live with this handicap for the years to come. Best Pricing was not discussed in the text, but instead replaced by Best Execution. This method created a lot of conversation about the cost of execution and today clients and investors still are not getting the best gross price, but only the ‘best’ net price. So, congratulations, MiFID, on six years of achievement; we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of MiFID 2 to continue your work. Father Ferber towels are well-warmed at the moment. The views expressed in this blog post are the personal opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of the FIA European Principal Traders Association or the Futures Industry Association.
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MiFID - congratulations on your sixth anniversary
It occurred to me recently that there has not been any news coverage of the 6th anniversary of MiFID, which was implemented in Europe on November 1st 2007. The pregnancy of MiFID took many many years: some claim as many as 14. Today we are awaiting a new member of the family: MiFID 2. The exact date of birth is yet to be confirmed, but Father Ferber is warming up the towels as we speak.
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Does a liquidity provider also 'remove' liquidity?
The definitions of both liquidity and liquidity provider are always an issue of much debate and often confusion. I've always believed the best definition of liquidity is the ability to transfer an asset into cash (or the other way around).
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Systems of the future
Have you seen the video of the BMW driving down Germany’s Autobahn with no one at the controls? You might not think that a “hands free” driving experience is one you’d ever like to have yourself but it’s quite extraordinary to watch. As long as the route is programmed into the car, it can manoeuvre itself through the traffic.
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The myths around latency arbitrage
One of the criticisms of High Frequency Trading is that they gain an unfair advantage by receiving data faster than others. This enables them to react to market events before anybody else and effectively ‘front-run’ the rest of the market.
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A light bulb goes off at Bercy
Every now and then we all have an "aha!" moment: with a flash of inspiration, we see a new way to solve a problem or unravel a mystery.
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FIA EPTA Issues MiFID Position Paper
The FIA European Principal Traders Association issued a position paper on Oct. 15 outlining its positions on several key issues related to the regulation of financial markets.
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FIA EPTA Issues MiFID Position Paper
The FIA European Principal Traders Association issued a position paper on Oct. 15 outlining its positions on several key issues related to the regulation of financial markets.
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