Viewing the MiFID community in the raw

Welcome to MiFID day.  Congratulations.  I'm sure this day will be remembered for a long time as the day that Heather Mills, the ex-Mrs. Paul McCartney, went insane.

To
be honest, it's all a bit quiet today.  Maybe everyone is waiting for
the systems to explode with pan-European trading ... nope.  Nothing
happening.

Project Turquoise has now been branded "Project Tortoise", although any group which represents two-thirds of off-exchange trading in Europe should be taken seriously.

The
traditional exchanges are still in business and their share prices and
liquidity seem surprisingly robust.  In fact, LSE's newly luanched
TradElect platform claims to be one of Europe's fastest with the
ability to process 4,200 trades a second with six millisecond
processing.

Chi-x is nibbling away in Holland and Germany, and
claimed 10% of the trading in BP last week during a particularly
exciting day of trading. 

Other than that, nothing.

Give it five years ...

There
will be 2, maybe 3, pan-European exchanges trading across Europe.  And
these will have expanded into multi-asset trading venues rather than
being equities Exchanges.

The few other exchanges that exist will be specialised around complex instruments or commodities.

There
will less than ten investment banks who, combined, will manage 80% of
European trading. The rest will be focused around research,
connectivity, analytics or other capabilities such as the provision of
outsourced execution services for boutique buy-side institutions.

Hedge
funds will still dominate most trading using complex news algo
strategies that move markets in seconds.  Livelihoods will be made and
broken in milliseconds.

All of the institutions will have
light-speed connectivity globally and will look at Europe as a trading
pool in a global asset allocation strategy ... rather than as a region.

Sure,
MiFID will have an impact.  But let's not forget there's an awful lot
else - technology, BATS, NYSE, Mumbai, Shanghai, private equity, hedge
funds, news algorithmics - happening at the same time.

Meanwhile, I went off and had a sniff around another place this morning. 

Facebook. 

Apparently,
233 million working hours are lost in Britain boon-doggling social
newtorking sites each day, and I must donating a good few myself.  But
hey, it's fun so butt out buddy.

Interestingly there's a Facebook
community dedicated to MiFID called "MiFID is taking over my life ...
argh!"  It's only got 43 members, of which I'm one, and was started by
Justin Laur of Reuters.  That may explain why so many of the members
are from Reuters, although there's also guys from HSBC, JPMC and
Macquarie, as well as folks from as far afield as Luxembourg, Italy and
Philadelphia, USA. 

Comments include:

Rebecca wrote: "Oh
my God!! It seems like things might have actually gone ok this weekend
- or have I just jinxed it by saying that...???"

Graham  wrote on October 2nd, 2007: "From our Intranet - MiFID: The next big challenge is  29 days away! Ooo." 

Peter wrote on October 27th,  2007: "Less than a week now. Hands up all those who are beyond  excitement."

and
Chris (not me) wrote: "MiFID was on Working Lunch today, although the
'expert' had no idea what he was on about! They even spelt it Mifid
without the annoying CamelCase." 

Best comment from Christophe: "I'm waiting for November 2nd".

So am I.

November
2nd 2012 that is when all this will be done and dusted and the future
of European markets is far clearer than the muddle of today.