Castel most recently served as a trader focused on equities (cash and swap), foreign exchange, and listed derivatives.

He will begin his new role as of 1 November, based in Denmark, The TRADE understands. 

Castel was one of The TRADE’s Rising Stars of Trading and Execution in 2023, recognised as a budding buy-side talent in the institutional trading space. 

Over the years the Rising Stars initiative, in collaboration with Instinet, has recognised many up-and-coming buy-side talents, several of whom have gone on to head up some of the largest and most successful desks across the world’s leading asset managers and hedge funds.

Candriam declined to comment when approached by The TRADE.

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Kepler Cheuvreux appointed Alvin Gattoc as an electronic sales trader within its New York trading team. Gattoc joined the firm from Beacon Platform, where he served as account executive. Prior to that, he spent nearly three years at Cboe Global Markets as director, US equities account coverage. Previously, he spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs serving in a variety of roles, most recently as vice president, multi asset platform sales.

Federated Hermes appointed former vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, Kendell James, to join its trading desk. He joined Federated Hermes as an equity trader covering TMT and the consumer and luxury sectors. Before joining the asset manager, James served as a vice president in equity trading at Cantor Fitzgerald in London and New York. Prior to joining Cantor’s equity desk in 2018, James spent a year as a graduate research fellow in the US Department of Education.

Nordea Asset Management’s head of fixed income trading, Carsten Just, has departed the asset manager after almost five years heading up its credit team. Just, who is based in Copenhagen, joined Nordea AM in March 2018 as head of fixed income trading, after a number of years running and founding fintech firms including simplefintech.com. He previously spent three years as head of trading and prop with Danish financial services and insurance group Alm. Brand, prior to which he worked as a portfolio manager and client executive with various banks including SEB Merchant Banking, Danske Bank and ATP. In a social media update, Just explained that: “I have decided to explore a new path focusing more directly on developing the technology, data and market structures needed to support the evolution of markets.”

Liquidnet’s former global head of equities, Rob Laible, joined BMLL as its new head of Americas. Laible joined BMLL based in New York after spending the last eight years at Liquidnet, serving in various senior equities-focused roles. Prior to joining Liquidnet in 2014, Laible spent a year and a half at Maquarie Group as its head of program trading and electronic execution for Asia and around four years at Nomura Securities in various cash and program/electronic trading roles. Previously in his career he also spent 10 years at Lehman Brothers in sales trading and prime brokerage sales roles and 11 years at ITG as an executive vice president.

Multi-asset liquidity and trading technology provider BidX Markets appointed Harry Fry as its new head of APAC. He joined BidX Markets from Invast Global, where he served as director of prime services. Prior to that, he spent five and a half years at Finalto, initially as a trading solutions analyst and later in an institutional business development role. Previously, Fry served at JP Morgan Asset Management as an oversight analyst and a UK funds consultant. Based in Australia, Fry will help grow BidX Markets’ institutional trading business in the APAC region.

Former Berenberg equity sales trader Matt Beswick took on a new position as equity and macro trader with Monaco Asset Management (IO hedge fund). Beswick joined Berenberg in May 2021, prior to which he worked in electronic trading with Credit Suisse for almost three years.  

FX options trader at Investec, Richard Hall, left the financial services company to join Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in the same role. He joined from Investec where he spent five years. Previously, he served as an analyst, corporate and institutional banking at Investec for two and a half years. Hall began his career as an intern at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), where he served for four months.

The post People Moves Monday: Shifts in the trading space appeared first on The TRADE.

Nordea Asset Management’s head of fixed income trading, Carsten Just, has departed the asset manager after almost five years heading up its credit team, The TRADE can reveal. 

In a social media update, Just explained that: “I have decided to explore a new path focusing more directly on developing the technology, data and market structures needed to support the evolution of markets. 

“Over the last five years at Nordea AM I have seen fixed income markets continue to develop, but they are only part way on a long path. I am passionate about guiding that change.” 

Just, who is based in Copenhagen, joined Nordea AM in March 2018 as head of fixed income trading, after a number of years running and founding fintech firms including simplefintech.com. He previously spent three years as head of trading and prop with Danish financial services and insurance group Alm. Brand, prior to which he worked as a portfolio manager and client executive with various banks including SEB Merchant Banking, Danske Bank and ATP. Between 2008 and 2011 he was the principal portfolio officer for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Washington DC, heading up the global rates division and responsible for the internal hedge fund along with a $25 billion bond portfolio.  

“I am very grateful for the opportunity I was given back in 2018 and it is with some regret I am leaving. I will for sure miss my, now former, colleagues,” said Just. “However, I am also looking forward to progressing even further in another position and capacity.” 

The post Nordea AM head of fixed income trading departs appeared first on The TRADE.

A senior equity trader at Nordea Asset Management has departed and joined Danish boutique asset manager BLS Capital to head up its trading activities.

Malene Forup confirmed on LinkedIn that she joined BLS Capital as head of execution in Copenhagen this month, after two years as a senior equity trader at Nordea Asset Management.

Forup has extensive buy-side trading experience and initially joined Nordea Investment Management as a senior trader in 2000, spending seven years in the role.

She then spent more than 11 years as head trader for equities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Singapore based fund management firm GIC, prior to her most recent role at Nordea Asset Management.

The buy-side trading appointment follows a series of senior trading moves in the last six months as the buy-side continues to re-calibrate itself.

In February, Santander Asset Management’s head of dealing for the UK, Danny Ramos, departed after 14 years with the firm, while Vontobel Asset Management appointed former multi-asset trading head at Pictet Asset Management, Jean-Michel Manry, to lead its fixed income trading business.

The moves were followed swiftly in March by the news that BNP Paribas Asset Management had appointed 20-year BNP Paribas executive, Inés de Trémiolles, as its next global head of trading.  

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Miles Kumaresan, founder and CEO, Wave Labs

Nordea Asset Management’s former global head of trading is looking to revolutionise institutional bond trading as he prepares to launch a bond execution system via his start-up. 

Miles Kumaresan, founder and CEO of Wave Labs, has unveiled details of the new platform exclusively to The TRADE ahead of its launch in early September.

The platform was due to launch earlier this year, but Kumaresan delayed the rollout due to the COVID-19 crisis. He has since demoed the system with six buy-side heads of trading, most of which he expects to onboard upon launch. 

Known as eLiSA (Electronic Liquidity Seeking Application), the web-based platform aims to solve the complexities and challenges in institutional bond trading that Kumaresan says he faced during his time with Nordea Asset Management, and that other fixed income execution management systems (EMS) have failed to address.

“At Nordea, I really struggled to grasp the nuances of fixed income trading which were new to me at the time,” he tells The TRADE. “When the penny finally dropped and I suddenly realised the complexities of the whole process, I understood there was no way I could solve these problems from within. A fixed income EMS is a hard sell for any vendor. The systems in the market have simply replicated workflows from equities, adding no value for traders, and any adaptations in these systems have been rudimentary – simply facilitating the status quo in liquidity sourcing.”

“I knew I had to find a solution to the fixed income EMS, and in order to do so, I had to look at the fundamentals – the A, B and Cs of fixed income – and solve each of those issues. I understood that only then will the fixed income EMS truly make a difference. This is what we have spent the past two years doing, creating a system with a vast array of features that would level the playing field for all market participants – a tech suitable for buy-side, sell-side, ETF liquidity providers, hedge funds and others.”

Senior buy-side bond traders have previously made the case that most EMS platforms in the market are a tool for equities markets and not fixed income. Like Kumaresan, they argued that many of the systems have applied equities models to fixed income, despite stark differences in trading processes and liquidity landscapes.

In contrast, Kumaresan states the backbone of the eLiSA system, which was developed by Wave Labs following in-depth discussions with traders, portfolios managers and analysts, is a new workflow that is inherent to fixed income trading, focused on in-depth analysis, and execution.

“This is a very innovative piece of trading technology that has a uniquely fixed income workflow,” Christoph Hock, head of multi-asset trading at Union Investment, told The TRADE about the eLiSA platform.

The system offers multiple channels for execution, including high-touch trading, semi-automated and fully-automated execution, auto-quoting, and automated liquidity seeking and smart order negotiation and routing functionality. 

eLiSA offers a suite of tools for high-touch traders for visually identifying liquidity spots and price differences, as well as a data mining tool to score, rank and make broker recommendations. Kumaresan believes a ‘black-box’ spurting out recommendations doesn’t suffice anymore. His system’s broker recommendations include a summary of why the broker is recommended, with the benefits of the recommended broker visually highlighted in comparison to all other brokers.

“This is a much more complex math problem than what meets the eye,” Kumaresan adds. “You need to have a complete lifecycle of adjusting scores up and down on a daily basis. How do you reward or penalise quotes that never resulted in a trade? How do you score two bad quotes? It’s equally challenging to give new or non-mainstream brokers a fair chance. If you don’t have much data, how can a model recommend someone with limited trade history? We believe we have a complete process for this with clear explanations.”

Elsewhere, eLiSA starts with the portfolio manager in providing granular pre-trade analysis, as well as data aggregation, historic and visualised axe, indication of interest (IOI), request for quote (RFQ) data, and the system’s flagship real-time fair value analysis.

Kumaresan explains that most bonds are interrelated and there are significant non-linearities in their relationships. This means that estimating an accurate fair value, or price, for a bond based on where others are trading is a big challenge for market participants, particularly doing so in real-time. The fair value analysis aims to solve this challenge by demonstrating recommendations that can be converted in terms of potential profit and loss. 

“We take pre-trade analysis to a much more granular level in terms of what the market is doing and the fair value. It is important that the trader has confidence in the fair value recommendations as this is absolutely key to the system. It runs throughout the entire platform. This is yet another deviation from the typical equities-style use of reference quotes only in fixed income,” Kumaresan says. 

The during-trade analysis also allows traders to monitor and analyse market conditions to find liquidity and track execution trends, alongside real-time estimations of probability of fill, and optimal execution parameter recommendations.

“Unlike equities, fixed income trading is closely linked to the portfolio manager and our tool starts with the portfolio manager, with pre-trade analysis and portfolio construction alternatives,” Kumaresan says.  

“Then, it goes to the trader in the form of single, list, portfolio, substitute or synthetic orders. With the exception of portfolio orders, you don’t just send it to one broker or venue, you work the orders in all available liquidity pools and with many different brokers. This is realised using a variety of protocols following trader specified scheduling logic to negotiate and execute that package of bonds, to then access that highly fragmented liquidity. Wherever the other side of a trade is posted, eLiSA will find it.”

For execution, eLiSA provides several order types including portfolio trading, which has surged in popularity with buy-side traders recently. However, Kumaresan explains that when engaging with portfolio trades, it can be difficult to know if the price of a bond from the 200 names in a portfolio is, in fact, a good price. His platform aims to offer more advanced slippage decomposition analysis and optimal execution evaluation to solve this challenge, with the aim of reducing transaction costs.

“With portfolio trading, it’s extremely important to get that price back from the broker, decompose it and see for yourself if you are being priced fairly or not on a bond-by-bond basis. You may see that 90% of the pricing is indeed fair, and want to remove the outlier bonds from the portfolio and source it separately. This is another way in which traders add significant value. 

“In a world where it is very difficult to know where a bond should be priced, verifying the broker pricing of hundreds of names in a portfolio in addition to all other trading tasks is a daunting prospect without tools to assist. But with our system, from a compliance point of view, at the click of a button one can document best execution in large portfolio trades,” Kumaresan says.

“The much-needed paradigm shift in fixed income trading needs catalysts for change and eLiSA may just be one of them. While liquidity in fixed income is highly fragmented, there is plenty of liquidity to be found at the right price and place. The challenge is for the holders of liquidity to make this available. Imagine a marketplace in which the natural holders of liquidity, namely asset managers, were to start offering portions of their liquidity? This would revolutionise the 1970s style market structure that we still have now in 2020.”

The buy-side has increasingly leaned towards taking on a price maker role in fixed income markets as relationships with dealers have evolved. BlackRock’s head of global trading, Supurna VedBrat, has previously highlighted that she sees the buy-side taking on the alternative role in disclosing prices, which could be beneficial for asset managers and the liquidity landscape.

Kumaresan adds the price making functionality on the eLiSA system offers any asset manager the ability to make prices in thousands of bonds while satisfying portfolio constraints. Using an example of a typical fund having positions in a smaller subset of names making up the benchmark index it tracks, Kumaresan explains that a position in 500 names out of 2,500 leaves the trader synthetically short of 2,000. By making prices on the 2,000 bonds, Kumaresan says, the fund achieves a reduction in tracking error and can capture bid/ask spreads associated with the illiquid bonds.

“This activity alone can boost the performance of the fund by 25bps or more if done right – meaning, if you usually make 50bps annualised, now you are making 75bps or more. The net effect of this is the fund’s performance ranking will climb upwards,” Kumaresan claims. “This is particularly useful in extreme or volatile market conditions, where besides capturing much larger gains, traders can help stabilise the market. A natural consequence of the price making activity is the flooding of new liquidity into electronic venues. Even illiquid venues can attract liquidity, so long as they offer innovative protocols.”

The execution platform is currently connected to a major fixed income trading venue, with plans to add more in the near future. It also includes auto-negotiating functionality which aims to give traders the opportunity to work multiple venues or multiple orders at the same time with zero touch, according to strict conditions set by the user.

“The auto-negotiation is like cruise control, and it’s extremely useful if you’re the driver with so many other things happening. It is just not practically possible for a trader to simultaneously work 300 names, and that’s why so many opt for RFQ because finding liquidity is so difficult and time-consuming at venues. The trader should do the thinking part and let the technology do the laborious liquidity seeking part.”

“Other systems simply operate as an interface to send orders to other platforms to be worked from there, which is a very manual process. With the automated liquidity seeking tool, our platform will find the liquidity, negotiate multiple bonds for you, and help navigate the execution.”

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Miles Kumaresan, chief executive, Wave Labs

A new start-up is taking aim at established fixed income trading practices by placing greater power into the hands of traders and portfolio managers.

Former head of trading and FinTech at Nordea Asset Management, Miles Kumaresan, founded Wave Labs last year after departing the firm and is confident that he has built the tools necessary to disrupt the dominance of voice-based trading in the fixed income markets.

“In a healthy market ecosystem, there is a need for all types of actors,” Kumaresan told The TRADE. “While the buy-side, who are the true liquidity owners, would form the backbone of such an ecosystem, there is an acute need for others such as banks and alternative liquidity providers too. All these players should compete on a level technological playing field to be both providers and takers of liquidity.”

Details of the Wave Labs product are currently under wraps until the official launch later this year, but the idea behind the venture is to bypass the middle-man in the trading process by allowing traders to find liquidity themselves, empowering them through a set of “finer controls for trading”, according to Kumaresan.

“While it will take away some of the tedious work, it will also add lot more complexity to trading,” he explained. “The net effect is that one can work complex contingent orders and get better prices. This will definitely not reduce head count on any desk.”

The eventual goal of the Wave Labs tool would be to drive bid/ask spreads tighter and ease the path to fixed income liquidity for traders, and Kumaresan has already received interest in the project from several buy-siders, most of which he will not disclose yet.

“Miles is working on a novel approach – we would like to be involved in order to evaluate, support and to provide input,” said Erling Skorstad, COO investments at Nordea Asset Management. “If the final product from Wave Labs meets our expectations, we will then look to make use of the tradable streaming prices offered to us by banks and alternative liquidity providers via this platform.

“To exploit the contingent trading features, we will evaluate a direct interface between the platform and our SimCorp back-end.”

Disruptive behaviour

While there have been numerous entrants in the fixed income world seeking to introduce a new element of disruption, electronifying the market has proved to be a slow process, and for some, an impossible task.

The most notable example is BondCube, which generated a huge level of interest after it positioned itself as the “eBay of the corporate bond market” only to fall apart a few years later. While there is no guarantee that the industry will embrace the Wave Labs proposition, Kumaresan is so far taking a far more cautious approach, keeping product and prospective client details close to his chest until it’s ready for launch and running the operation on a modest staff.

The larger incumbents in the fixed income market may put up more resistance to the presence of new challengers such as Wave Labs, although Kumaresan states his tech will in fact bring more business to the venues, rather than take any away.

“Electronic venues in fixed income are fundamentally import,” he asserted. “However, order matching protocols of these venues alone cannot facilitate matching of the full spectrum of orders. We are working on this missing part. This also include addressing the portfolio manager workflow.”

He reiterates the point that Wave Labs is first and foremost a technology vendor and that market participants will continue to look for liquidity on trading venues, although as evidenced by his experiences with them thus far – “I have only had preliminary conversations with two of them. One was very enthusiastic. The other one not at all.” – not everyone enjoys disruption to the status quo.

Personal mission

When The TRADE profiled Kumaresan for the Q1 cover feature last year, he admitted to being “consumed” by the problem of aggregating fragmented liquidity across asset classes, particularly in fixed income.

Having spent the larger part of the past three years combatting this problem through the development and creation of new tools to facilitate execution, Kumaresan decided that it was time to leave Nordea in September last year to take on this challenge solo.

“As head of trading, one of my primary responsibilities was to optimise trading cost. In other asset classes, this is easily doable using combination of statistical models and technology. In fixed income however, there is not much room for this. It is very difficult to even quantify execution quality in fixed income – a fundamental piece for the optimisation process,” he said.

“This bothered me endlessly as I could not make meaningful contribution to fixed income trading quality. While I immensely enjoyed working at Nordea AM, this became my pre-occupation full time and I needed to set out and see whether I could come up with a solution.

“All I knew when I left Nordea was that one needed to rethink everything we are currently doing in fixed income. You cannot fix a dysfunctional setup with a plaster.”

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Miles Kumaresan, head of trading and FinTech, Nordea Asset Management

“There is nothing more challenging and relevant now than the aggregation of fragmented liquidity in all asset classes, especially in fixed income,” says Miles Kumaresan, global head of trading and FinTech at Nordea Asset Management. “I’m consumed with this problem.”

Enhancing Nordea’s ability to source liquidity in the fixed-income markets, particularly in the credit space, is the most prominent conundrum facing Kumaresan. Having spent the bulk of his career with investment banks and hedge funds, Kumaresan is now applying his experience with the Copenhagen-based asset manager, having joined the firm in February 2016 with the dual responsibility for Nordea’s trading and technology teams.

“I was never a born trader,” he says. “I was one of these guys who could create tools to help with execution. Everything that we are doing now is to create tools; where they already exist we will use them, but if they don’t exist then we will create specialist tools for the traders, either in liquid or illiquid brackets. This is what we do.”

It is, of course, a futile exercise to implement technology tools without the right teams in place to use them. As well as its 26 traders located in Copenhagen, Bergen and Stockholm, Nordea has invested in a five-person trading research and development team and a five-person IT team focused on trading, a reflection of the company’s recognition that technological innovation is critical to staying competitive.

Building a diverse team

An efficient trading operation requires a diverse set of traders, ranging from classical to quantitative, to enable it to thrive. Kumaresan says that Nordea has a strong base of experienced traders to which it has added three junior traders with strong quantitative and IT skills, brought in last year.

“Everyone in trading has their skills enhanced continuously wherever they are lagging,” he adds. “This is how we were able to retain all of our traders during transition and leverage off their depth of experience. Stacking the desk with only cheaper junior talents was never an option.”

The first thing to take care of in the process is risk rather than reward, according to Kumaresan. Operational mistakes can occur extremely easily with manual repetitive tasks and some of these errors can be very costly. “You need to automate all the operational instructions at every part of the pipeline, starting at the order source, all the way down to it hitting the trading desk,” he says.

Nordea’s trading structure has evolved throughout the two years Kumaresan has been with the firm, the primary of which is the division of teams by instrument liquidity across asset classes first and then by specialisation.

Orders traded in the new cross-asset “Liquid Trading Desk” are suitable for automatic routing to brokers with either zero or very low touch, using what Kumaresan calls a proprietary systematic model that plugs directly into its FlexTrade execution management system. This frees up the high touch trading teams to add value on demanding orders.

The asset manager also has specific teams dealing with high touch trading where specialist knowledge and human involvement can be required. But, even here, traders are given tools in line with the technology-driven focus of the company.

Fixed income traders, for example, use tools that aggregate real-time and historic market data sets to assist with price and liquidity discovery. In equities, the company is developing a model to price liquidity in very large orders to help traders with large blocks.

Technology de jour

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently the technology de jour for the majority on the buy-side and Nordea is no exception. The firm currently uses AI within its pre-trade workflow automation processes to detect erroneous data and ensure data integrity, particularly useful with these types of problems as AI can capture far more obscure data errors that occur in the pre-trade process.

AI in trading still remains a somewhat slippery entity; while there are some impressive AI systems out there, Kumaresan says that much of this is simply “what used to be called statistics a couple of years ago.” Having spent the greater part of his academic years studying computer sciences and having attained a Master of Philosophy degree in AI and Robotics, Kumaresan doesn’t impress easily when it comes to the AI label that can often be erroneously applied in the FinTech space.

“Having built AI for a long time in other contexts my view is that the majority of the technology with the AI sticker is mere snake oil,” he says. “Therefore, I am a little hesitant in using the word AI.”

And he says that having AI replace humans for trading is “absolutely not” likely in the foreseeable future: “AI can beat chess grand masters because chess has clear states, structure and rules. Trading, on the other hand, requires complex higher level decision making based on vast amounts of mostly noisy and ambiguous information. Therefore, I expect execution to remain an inalienable prerogative of human traders for a long time to come,” he says.

Nordea also has models to normalise trade slippage, to convert raw slippage data into a form that is comparable across metrics in order to conduct accurate comparative analysis. This analysis fuels another real-time statistical decision-making engine that assists in deciding who to trade with and what execution method to employ on orders suitable for zero and low touch trading.

Another project underway at the firm is the development of a complex contingent trading framework across asset classes, which calls on portfolio managers to use structured rules to build up high-level trading instructions.

“It empowers them to specify and obtain more accurate pre-trade cost estimates on complex execution rules. This assists traders with clear trading instructions when working baskets of say multi-day orders contingent on relative price movements,” says Kumaresan.

So with all this technology, how close is the market to solving the original puzzle of liquidity?

The liquidity conundrum

Equities may have its fair share of challenges in aggregating liquidity across lit and dark venues; however, liquidity in equity markets is a relatively predictable phenomenon, mostly due to price transparency. Foreign exchange, meanwhile, still has its antiquated mores—in particular the last-look practice that distorts the true liquidity picture.

The real liquidity problem lies in fixed income. Finding liquidity in the fixed income markets, specifically in credit, has become one of the most enduring puzzles across the buy-side. Credit liquidity is fragmented and discontinuous across both price and time partly due to the infrequent trading property of corporate bonds, explains Kumaresan, which is not helped by the fact there are over ten thousand ISINs in Europe and twice that number in the US.

“Fixed income is still in the dark ages in a technological context,” says Kumaresan. “Before the crisis, banks had all the balance sheet needed to price a wider range of bonds in size. Now you have the same trading structure even though the sell-side can no longer carry big inventory.”

The more advanced segments of the sell-side have been trying to make up for the shortcoming of diminished inventory through technological and quantitative innovation—for example, by automatically pricing a large universe of bonds in order to offer tradable streaming prices. Kumaresan believes this is a “is a big step in the right direction,” with innovations of this kind becoming critical going forward in retaining the role as providers of easy liquidity.

“The new reality of the market structure warrants a new trading paradigm,” says Kumaresan. “Just because we get the majority of our orders done on the first day does not imply that the market is liquid or that the prices we got were good. It is merely the best price given the circumstances. I believe that, particularly in credit, the buy side becoming price makers on the names in which we have a natural interest in, through all-to-all trading, is critical to generate and attract liquidity. This active way of sourcing liquidity could become a real disruptive event in credit.”

All-to-all can’t solve everything

The need to find better ways to trade in fixed income has been addressed by platforms such as MarketAxess, Tradeweb, Liquidnet and Trumid, as well as the many other electronic venues attempting to make all-to-all trading possible. Rather than solving the puzzle, the proliferation of venues has had a very different consequence— namely of greater liquidity fragmentation, says Kumaresan.

As yet there remains no single universal trading protocol that suits all the different types of fixed income order sizes and names. Each venue is currently attempting to solve the order matching problem differently with an emphasis on different segments of the liquidity and size spectrum.

“While the classical RFQ (request- for-quote) trading protocol, used by MarketAxess, is good for somewhat smaller orders and for the more liquid end of the universe it is not suitable for very large orders or illiquid names, because the information leakage is too high with this approach,” says Kumaresan.

“The Liquidnet and Trumid protocols, on the other hand, leak less information but finding a match manually is more difficult. If a protocol is stealthy, then by definition, the low information leakage will also reduce the chances of spotting that liquidity. The key to solving the liquidity puzzle is to embrace all useful trading venues and protocols through a smart liquidity seeking algorithm.”

There is, of course, the argument that buy-side trades are too correlated to enable the all-to-all market to work, because how do you find a seller when everyone else wants to buy too? But Kumaresan disputes the correlation argument.

“While there is a fair level of correlation, the mere fact that sell-side market makers typically turn over most of their books within five days implies that there is sufficient interest on the opposite side of a trade within this small time window,” he says. “Given that the buyside has 95% plus of the liquidity, we are most likely the ones on the opposite side too, helping turn over sell-side books. This would imply that we are not as correlated as we may think.”

Clearly there is still much work to do in order to meet the demand for a new class of technology that can aggregate the vast quantities of data in the fixed income market, while also enhancing workflows in a seamless manner and introducing a smart liquidity-seeking algorithm.

While that is no small task to take on, the pace of technology innovation has undoubtedly spiked in recent years, meaning traders can often be spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting systems – albeit with the caveat that while good systems, they do not provide a seamless workflow. As Kumaresan puts it: “Empowering traders with technology tools is how one gets an edge. It’s like hunting; even if you are a great hunter you still need the tools to get the job done.”

The post Miles Kumaresan: Better trading through technology appeared first on The TRADE.

The head of fixed income trading at Nordea Asset Management has left the firm following a business reorganisation, a spokesperson has confirmed.

Brett Chappell first joined Nordea’s banking division in 2001 as a chief sales manager for credit bonds, credit derivatives and interest rate derivatives.

He moved to Danske Bank in 2007 where he was head of DCM sales for almost eight years, selling credit bonds and other fixed income products to large institutional investors.

In 2014, Chappell returned to Nordea as head of fixed income trading within its asset management business based in Copenhagen. 

Jakob Jessen, head of illiquid execution at Nordea Asset Management, commented in a statement: “Due to a reorganisation at Nordea Asset Management, Brett Chappell has decided to seek new opportunities outside Nordea.

“We’ll like to thank Brett for his dedicated work during the last four years in the bank and we wish him all the best in his future endeavours.” 

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Nordea Asset Management has installed a commission management and research evaluation tool to support its research payment account (RPA) compliance ahead of MiFID II.

The asset manager opted for Commcise’s ‘CommciseBUY’ service, which provides an end-to-end and integrated tool for research unbundling.

Amrish Ganatra, CEO at Commcise, explained the firm has become a key partner for Nordea Asset Management in their commission management and research evaluation process.

“This project, delivered on time and within budget, is providing a single end-to-end, cloud based solution, with all the functionality required in a secure, cost effective manner,” he added. 

The post Nordea implements RPA service ahead of MiFID II appeared first on The TRADE.

Nordea Asset Management has named its new head of equities trading, following Per Moeller’s decision to retire from the industry. 

Rolf Mølkjær will join Nordea as head of equities trading on 1 June this year, following six years with Nykredit Asset Management in the same position.

He replaces Per Moeller who has retired after being with Nordea since 2001, holding several senior equities trading roles with the buy-side firm.

Prior to his time at Nykredit, Mølkjær worked at Danske Capital, working his way up from dealer to portfolio manager to head of equity trading.

Nordea Asset Management reported record assets under management of €330 billion in the first quarter this year.

Commenting on the performance, CEO at Nordea, Casper von Koskull, said the firm is “now seeing good potential for a synchronised recovery with improving growth prospects.”

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