~~~~ ” Leveraged fixed-income arbitrage trading strategies have not been a popular topic in the past several months. However, following the dislocations that occurred to world financial markets in the second half of 1998, many good opportunities for fixed-income arbitrage trading continue to exist for those firms that survived the peril of the previous year.
Indeed, [...]
Thursday, November 13, 2008
I’m reading a whitepaper on OTC markets from the interdealer broker ICAP… lots to comment upon…
ICAP is the world’s largest and most powerful broker’s broker… headquartered in London they deal in FX, fixed income, derivative, commodity, and money markets. Their operations span all currencies and timezones.
ICAP serves as the central hub for massive global flows [...]
Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism) and Daniel Gross (Newsweek, Slate and The Big Money) discuss the shadow banking system, market structure, the CDS auction settlement process, the failure of Lehman Brothers, legislative and regulatory efforts and some ways forward… (running time = 27:45)
Thursday, October 2, 2008
As the credit crisis decimates the balance sheets of the big fixed income dealers there is less principal trading… this is where the big dealers would use their balance sheets to interposition bonds between buyers and sellers… the dealers owned these markets through this market making activity… think Lehman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and Bear… [...]
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I always believed that FIX, the standard for electronic trading of securities, had the flexibility and power to reorder the fixed income markets.
I’ve thought that FIX had the capacity to unify and standardize markets that were entirely dominated by the dealers…
Well… you believe and believe… and faith does sustain one… but real signals of change are [...]