LCH-CME Switch Trades and Margin Management

Recently we have started to see stories on large LCH-CME Switch trades (aka Basis Swaps) starting to be traded. See LCH-CME Basis Swaps primed for Growth (trial required) and Trad-X volumes hit record highs as platform introduces CCP position switch service. The first article highlights that $2.5b of 18M and $3b of 5Y traded in the […]

A Voyeur’s Delight: Bond Issuance and Swaps

Guest Blog Series Guest Blogger Profile: Interest Rate Swaps trader. 12+ years’ experience, European and cross markets focused Gather round and let me tell you a (hypothetical) story…… After the ECB cut rates, a friendly Debt Capital Markets executive pitched an idea to the European Investment Bank about selling some USD bonds. The EIB were […]

Why are there so many fintech startups in payments?

If you follow the FinTech Start-up scene in London, you cannot fail to notice the large number of start-ups in the payments space. A quick scan of the FinTech50 2014 list shows that twelve of the fifty firms focus on payments. These are AcceptEmail, Bottomline, Clear2pay, dovetail, GoCardLess, IXaris, Klarna, Lemonway, Paymill, Pingit, The Currency Cloud and […]

SEF: Week 37 (A Shakeup At The Top)

Last week proved to be quite interesting for SEFs.  We saw our first bit of activity from TeraExchange, Latam SEF began to post some real activity, and dare I say Bloomberg dropped to the #2 spot on the D2C list for Interest Rate swaps. First, the data.  Lets start with the usual daily activity by asset class: […]

CFTC Technology Advisory Committee Meeting on June 3, 2014

Tod presented ‘SEF Trading Overview and Participation’ at the CFTC Technology Advisory Committee meeting last week. To our delight the meeting has been recorded and is available on youtube (SEF section starts at 2.00.00)   The presentation slides are available for download here, although for convenience we have embedded in this post below. SEF Trading […]

SEF: Week 36

We’re now through the 2nd roll-off of packaged trade no-action relief.  As of June 2, packages containing at least one MAT product (and other swaps) are required to trade On-SEF.  This has resulted in quite an active week in SEF data.  Lets get to the numbers. First up, overall activity, trailing 5 weeks: Interesting to […]