Fixed Income Leaders Summit Singapore - China and eTrading

The Fixed Income Leaders Summit took place last week in Singapore, bringing the buy-side, sell-side and vendors under one roof to discuss industry themes.

Steve's takeaways below -

Electronic trading discussions included the evolution of All to All venues, like MarketAxess and OpenDoor. There were also presentations and panels on using different workflows, including auctions, plus technologies that address fragmentation like Axe Trading and Algomi (and TransFICC of course).

However, during the panels it was interesting to hear some different views about eTrading. Rachana Mehta of Maybank AM and Eric Neo of Golden Horse FM commented that eTrading was only suitable for certain types of products. Whilst Sovereign Bonds and CDS could be traded electronically, Asian Credits could not, due to a lack of liquidity and thus a lack of firm prices.

Gareth Nicholson of Bank of Singapore, Pierre-Emmanuel Charlier of Pictet and Nic Yiu of Allianz, gave us a different view during the TCA panel. They highlighted the benefits of eTrading, including access to timely data from multiple sources in open formats. This is seen as key to tackling the question of how to measure TCA, especially as Fixed Income markets need to assess other factors as well as price, including methodology, size, liquidity, history etc.

On the regulation side, David McClean of the FICC Market Standards Board highlighted a recently published Statement of Good Practice for Algorithmic Trading in FICC markets : https://fmsb.com/our-publications/#3.

Lastly, it was great to see the other startup’s pitching on the Shark Tank panel : TransFICC presented alongside Bondlinc and BondEvalue. Both these firms are based in Singapore, have great teams and some interesting technology. Check out their apps on the App store or Google Play, or just take a look at the websites.