As some of you have already seen, the clever chaps back at Fidessa Labs have created a live version of our award-winning Fragulator. This enables you to watch the ebb and flow of fragmentation for any European stock or index on a real-time basis (sorry, no other markets just yet). As you can see below, it was especially useful last Tuesday when Deutsche Börse had a hiccup and delayed its opening by 80 mins. The absence of trading during the outage proved, yet again, that the market is still overly dependent upon the primaries for price formation. The irony of this was highlighted as well by...

  Had a distinct sense of déjà vu at TradeTech in London last week. Seems like much of the debate and chatter was the same as it was last year – HFT, ill thought through regulation, etc. It struck me, though, that maybe the regulators should let the market decide what is good or bad for us rather than agonising over these issues on our behalf. Take HFT for example. Whilst different definitions abound, electronic market making has just as much right to exist as any other business model in today’s trading ecosystem. If you don’t want to trade with them,...

Had an interesting week in the sunshine at the FIA annual conference at Boca Raton, Florida. Not surprisingly, the main topic was the move to bring the worlds of exchange traded and OTC derivatives together. This has been mandated by politicians/regulators on both sides of the Atlantic and will lead to the creation of a multitude of electronic platforms known as SEFs in the US and OTFs in Europe… or will it? Despite all the noise and hoopla, market participants seem to be huddled together at the top of the diving board waiting for someone else to take the plunge first. Regulatory uncertainty...