EQUITIES
Buy-side profile
WORKING TOWARDS
A BETTER FUTURE FOR
THE BUY-SIDE TRADERS
ACROSS EUROPE
Richard Worrell
Head of EMEA Equity Trading for Janus Henderson Investors
Richard Worrell is the Head of EMEA Equity Trading for Janus Henderson Investors, the Chairman of
the Investment Association’s Buyside Trading Committee and a Plato Partnership board member.
Having helped drive the recent Investment Association (IA) and Association for Financial Markets in
Europe (AFME) proposal for shorter European market hours, we thought it was an appropriate time to
sit down with Richard and gather his thoughts on this and other key topics.
Can you explain the thinking behind
the market hours proposal?
There are three main pillars to the
proposal; market structure, mental
health and diversity & inclusion.
My dealing career started, in London,
on US markets, with 9.30am-4pm Wall
Street hours, so market structure has
always been front of mind. I always felt
Winter/Spring 2020
that the later opening time combined
with a good gap between corporate
earnings (usually around 7am), and
macro updates (usually 8.30), led
the US to be better prepared when
markets opened.
Then, many years later, when I
joined Janus Henderson Investors,
I was struck by a Transaction Cost
Analysis (TCA) report that showed
www.buysideintel.com
our Implementation Shortfall costs in
the first hour to be double that of any
other time period. Equally it always
feels a rush to be ready for the market
open here and generally opening
auctions were simply not of a size
worth participating in. Anecdotally, a
number of buyside peers also said they
left orders for 30-60minutes to let the
market settle.
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