EQUITIES AND FIXED INCOME
Buy-side profile
THE ALPHA TRADER
AND THE FUTURE
ROLE OF THE
TRADING DESK
Eric Heleine
Head of trading desk at Groupama Asset Management
I
am the responsible Head of Trading
running the trading desk as well
as the overlay management for
Groupama Asset Management. We
are trading equities, fixed income,
foreign exchange and both listed and
OTC derivatives.
I am in charge of deploying overlay
strategies to introduce automation,
announcements workflow and facilitate
activities for PMs. The global overlay
desk is a hybrid between trading and
cost optimisation, to prepare the
execution and manage the generation
of orders. This team would for example
8
structure how to best trade FX, futures
rolls etc. The overlay is separated from
the trading desk with management
capabilities taking orders from all entities
on the asset management side. It is still
crucial for the overlay team to work
in partnership with the dealing desk
to find; better processes for market
intelligence, the liquidity available, data
mining strategy and further efficiencies
for specific asset classes.
On the cross-asset trading desk we take
advantage of having an overview of all
our assets, sharing market content and
colour and we create further analysis for
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example around how the market evolves
and correlates signals between asset
classes. The trading desk is responsible
for execution and it has no capabilities of
its own to generate orders as that is the
sole responsibility of the PMs. The idea is
to position our trading desk as a ‘solution
and services’ desk for execution and best
execution with technology and trading
capabilities. The trading team analyse
all signals from the market coming
from our counterparties. We produce
smart analysis for our PMs qualitative
input on market colour, positioning,
market sentiment, risk by analysing the
derivatives market and market timing.
Summer 2019