The Fixed Income Leaders Summit - Takeaways

Steve just got back from the Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Barcelona, organised by WBR Research. Here are his thoughts.....

Firstly, I was happy to see how well attended the event was, with about 600 delegates. Must be the warm weather at this time of year!

And there was a good mix of Buy-Side, Sell-side, Execution platforms and technology vendors.

As expected, Electronic Trading and Regulation were the two key themes.

My main takeaways -

- Carl James, from Pictet - The role of Trader will change - This includes algo execution tools becoming more common (against a backdrop of market fragmentation and less warehousing by the sell side).

- David Bullen, from Bullen Management - There are 113 Trading Platforms (John Greenan from Alignment Systems has a blog with the complete list - http://blog.alignment-systems.com).
This is a great resource, which would have saved me a lot of time and effort when I was starting TransFICC.

- Mark Goodman, from UBS - Banks need to hold less inventory. But rather than this being seen as bad for the industry, its just part of the market evolution. And having less inventory isn’t exclusive to Fixed Income. That is just how the car industry has progressed. And the world's biggest hotel chain (Airbnb) and the biggest taxi firm (Uber) don't hold inventory either.

- Brett Chappell, from Nordea gave a very informative presentation on regulation - He provided a good explanation of the complexity of MiFID II and areas where the regulators still need to provide clarification.

Congratulations to Oliver Kirkbright from WBR for a great conference. See you next year

http://fixedincome.wbresearch.com