Tina at the 14 th ATF Fixed Income London
but it is already significantly less time
consuming compared to trading each
line item and to a lower cost. There is
still room for improvement as I expect
the internal solution will not be suitable
in the long run as portfolio trading will
continue to grow and become a part
of our daily work. So right now, the
remaining challenge for us is to improve
the workflow with full automation/
STP. While portfolio trading is now yet
another option, we also need to identify
if it is the optimal and suitable approach
for each portfolio.
I think we need the platforms to step
in with solutions for portfolio trading,
so we as traders can focus on our main
job of negotiating with the sell side and
ETF providers. We have seen a couple
of attempts by a few vendors but there
has not yet been any solution that fully
satisfies our needs.
We hear from the buy side that
market colour and pre-trade
intelligence are two hot areas of
interest. How do you see these areas
evolving within your fixed income
responsibilities?
As I mentioned before, the Nordea AM
Winter/Spring 2020
traders work as champions, meaning
everything from being on top of trading
processes to servicing/advising the PM’s
regarding pre-trade, timing, market
colour etc. The champion role helps us
to create clear points-of-entries and
value chain optimisation. We try to
act more like sell-side traders and not
just be price takers. Our technology
allows us to retrieve data from mulitple
providers and crunch the data for
our pre-trade analysis. This analysis
gives us a great insight; supporting
us in deciding appropriate execution
methods and in price making. The
alternative of only relying on traditional
sell-side brokers to deliver a full service
is no longer there.
Price discovery is very complex in the
Fixed Income world. A pre-trade view
is crucial for liquidity sourcing of block
trades in order to avoid information
leakage and to lower trading costs. To
manage this, we work with different
alternative execution methods
depending upon the order (size,
urgency, market timing, structure etc.).
The more complex market and trading
conditions have increased the need for
us traders to be involved during the
full lifecycle of a trade. For example
www.buysideintel.com
we are involved from the trade idea
generation (interaction with the PM’s)
to order generation, pre-trade analysis,
execution method, TCA and post-trade
(interaction with compliance).
Technology and trading capabilities
are important in order for the traders
to deliver colour and market analysis,
qualitative as well as quantative,
regarding market timing, positioning,
market sentiment etc. We spend a
lot of time filtering information and
interacting with the market to get
the best outcome of a trade. We often
provide the PM’s with market colour in
the very beginning of the investment
process in order to get an impression
of whether the trade idea is valid at all.
Market colour on potential, ongoing
or executed trades is something we
also continuously provide to the PM’s.
We are partnering up with the PM’s,
providing them with the information
they ask for. Access to enhanced
pre-trade transparency and realtime
post-trade transparency will improve
execution quality when assessing the
market regarding timing, pricing and
quality as well as reduce information
leakage. To provide the pre-trade and
market colour information to the PM’s,
we need both pricing and executing
tools.
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