Chris Skinner's blog

Shaping the future of finance

Regulation

MiFID II: the post-trade agenda

One of the big topics in capital markets is intra-day liquidity and post-trade transparency. Such discussions are far more noticeable now because the whole reason for this crisis, according to some, was the loss of trust between counterparties. That loss of trust was based upon counterparties not having enough liquidity to cover their positions. After…

Liquidiry Risk

Dark Pools are 1.36% of all EU trading

After the earlier discussions of flash crashes and HFT, on to dark pools. It was interesting that a colleague made the statement this week that all orders could be seen on US exchanges before they are filled as that may be true for some markets, but dark pools exist to ensure that orders cannot be…

Dark Pools, Jun10

So what was the cause of the ‘flash crash’

I got into a bit of trouble yesterday, as various colleagues told me that the discussion on the flash crash was inaccurate and full of errors. A key issue was the discussion of flash orders being part of the problem as, apart from a rare exception such as Direct Edge, flash orders no longer exist…

SEC to crackdown on HFT?

I gave my first presentation for a while last week on capital markets and what’s top of mind. Here are the headlines of key areas of focus: High Frequency Trading (HFT) Dark Pools Best Execution Post-Trade Transparency Global Trading Platforms MiFID II I’ll review these areas in more depth during the week, and start today…

Save Bulgaria’s Stock Exchange

I had a reach out from Patrick Young, investment advisor, author of "The Exchange Manifesto" and regular commentator on capital markets. Patrick co-authored an opinion piece with Victor Papazov, the founder and former CEO and chairman of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. He's given me permission to reprint the article…

How the Dodd-Frank Legislation impacts Capital Markets

I just got this in my intray from Woodbine Associates, an American research firm that works with the exchange, broker/dealer, asset manager, hedge fund and technology vendor communities. It’s really interesting and talks about the impact the new American reforms, known as the Dodd-Frank Legislation, and how this law will impact the Capital Markets. Therefore,…

Stressed? Don’t worry. The French and Germans will sort it out …

I will not spend much more time on this, but was irritated by the CEBS stress tests last week and so one more quick note. The reason CEBS, the European Commission and European Central Bank gave for not including the scenario of a sovereign default in the stress tests is that they just don’t think…

BNP Paribas

Why banks have no competition

I had a couple of really interesting dialogues with bankers yesterday. The first was with a career banker who is now working with one of the New Banks on its launch. The second was with an Asian bank manager running his bank's UK operations. As I talked with both, they expressed their frustrations with the…

Revising MiFID and RegNMS for HFT

Gawd, I hate acronymns and look at that!  Three in one blog entry title!!! Anyways, for the nerdy-nerd equities guys, this will grab their attention. It's all to do with trading in European and American stocks and shares using High Frequency Trading (HFT) systems, and the regulations therein with EU MiFID rules applying over here…

EU’s bank stress tests creating more bank stress

It turns out that 91 European banks are to be put through a ‘stress test’ to see how well or badly they will cope with a shock to the system. The stress test itself was a little unclear until late last week, when the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) detailed what would happen. As…