10th Asia Pacific Trading Summit Hong Kong

Out of the over 580 attendees, FIXGlobal spoke with a few event participants to get their take on liquidity, regulation and innovation in Asia.
What are you doing to find liquidity in this market?
And what is the biggest regulatory issue in Asia, either across the region or market-specific?
Srinivas Padmasola, Société Générale
To help our clients access liquidity we are building connectivity to as many venues (dark and lit) and fine tuning our SOR capabilities with Quality of Venue Measures.The constantly changing regulation is the biggest regulatory issue but it only goes to show that Electronic Trading has become a mainstream business.
 
Yang Xia, UBS
UBS continues to strive to provide its clients with choice and alternative liquidity. The combination of our best execution policy and liquidity strategy provides clients with a strong traditional block trading and syndicate service, while our best-in-class technology and in-house systems, provide access to automated internalised crossing services. Watching and potentially having to react to international events and imposing more rules around short selling, dark pool and algo trading that’s maybe not warranted but desired due to external forces.
Michael Corcoran, ITG
ITG is focused on providing the most dark liquidity options for the buyside. Our dark pool aggregator connects to over 17 dark pools in the region and helps to re-piece liquidity that’s been split down into small sizes across different trading venues. To that we’ve added the ability to connect buy-side firms directly to each other to maximize the chances of finding big blocks of natural liquidity. This combination helps find liquidity more quickly and efficiently.Over-regulation of alternative trading venues and dark liquidity is a concern. We’re very supportive of the approach being taken by regulators such as those in Hong Kong and Australia of monitoring volumes of alternative and dark trading to establish if any further rules needs to be put in place.
 



 
 
 
 
 
 
What single innovation has most significantly changed trading in the last 18 months? What will it be in the coming 18 months? And Why? 
Bryan Keough, IPC
Regulation has been and continues to be one of the primary drivers for innovation in capital markets: examples include the creation (and the demise) of alternative liquidity venues, the growth of high frequency and algorithmic trading, and going forward, new ways of trading OTC derivatives such as swap exchange facilities and organized trading facilities.
 
 
Tina Tsui, Equinix
From a strategy innovation perspective, it has to be the global trading ecosystem. Market participants can future proof their infrastructure investments while maximizing profit through connecting to such growing neutral global trading hubs that offers best connectivity, lowest latency and maximum security.
 
Bernard Ho, TradingScreen
Electronic trading is remaking the industry, including the traditional exchanges and new venues, the extension of algos to all asset classes, and the use of real-time TCA to monitor their performance. In the coming 18 months, traders will struggle to access liquidity in fragmenting venues (given that there are growing pockets of pools away from the traditional exchanges). The buy-side will rely more on technology and decision support tools like TCA in order to gain greater control, productivity and transparency in trading all asset classes.