The new block sizes in SDR data make trends in the data more difficult to identify – because now only 25% of notional should be “dark” (i.e. above the capped thresholds), down from 50%. More transparency is good, but we need to be careful when looking at data from before and after the new block […]

Block Calibration It has been a long journey to finally arrive at the “go-live” for new block thresholds on October 4th 2024. I covered it here on the blog, so rather than re-hash what has happened, please refer to the old posts linked below: Suffice to say that there have been more than a few […]

FMSB The FICC Markets Standard Board (see my 200th Clarus blog), known as the FMSB, recently published the paper “Spotlight Review on Pre-Hedging“. It makes great reading for anyone involved in Swaps markets – dealers, sales, trading, buyside. Read it! What is “Pre-Hedging”? According to the FMSB report, pre-hedging is the act of a dealer […]

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 […]