Hedge funds are frequently in the financial news, which is not at all surprising given the size of the sector and the public profile and wealth of the founders. So it is good to see that a Hedge Fund Monitor has been released by the Office of Financial Research of the U.S. Department of the […]

The EU Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) requires institutions to monitor transactions and develop specific algorithms to check for possible abuse covering insider dealing, market manipulation and other categories. One of the challenges is that calibrated monitoring thresholds tend to be conservative and consquently produce a high number of false positives. These must then be manually […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology and this article covers a number of key regulatory areas for asset management including the recent EU AI Act, bias, transparency and security. Please read on the ION Markets Blog.

My colleagues Ed Tyndale-Biscoe and Chris Brown published an article on the ION Markets Blog, which is well worth a read at Repo: The heart of the global financial system and why the SEC took action.

I recently took a first look at Central Clearing of Bonds and Repos and in that blog I mentioned a Financial Statility Board (FSB) paper on Liquidity in Core Government Bond Markets. This paper analyses the liquidity, structure and resilience of government bond markets, with a focus on the events of March 2020; characterised as […]

CFTC Global Markets Advisory Committee Following up on my blog last week, there is now the recording of the CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Committee (GMAC) available on youtube: There are some interesting take-aways: Showing; Elsewhere, Tradeweb and Bloomberg provided insights into the RFQ1 vs RFQ-to-many split amongst large trades. This is some really interesting data. […]

Those of you with long memories will recall a particular blog I wrote about Block Trading and new rules that were going to come into play: Those new rules could have come into play as early as March 2023, but they have been delayed until December 2023. As a result, we have just seen learnt […]

Q4 2020 saw $7.0bn DV01 of new USD-LIBOR* linked activity written in OTC derivatives markets. It is a similar story in GBP ($4.5bn DV01), JPY and CHF markets. Why is so much new risk being written against these indices when they are due to cease imminently? Responses to the IBA consultation on a possible cessation […]

Amended 7th October 2020 to correct the changes to block and cap thresholds to 67% and 75% respectively. The block threshold for Swaps, and all other OTC derivatives, is changing. The thresholds for trades qualifying for block status and the reporting cap for notional amounts are also diverging. This will substantially increase transparency in the […]