[ C O V E R
S T O R Y
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E D
W I C K S ]
or some, joining a new firm can
either be a challenge to their
existing perceptions or an exer-
cise in changing the perception
of others. For Ed Wicks, global
head of trading at Legal & Gen-
eral Investment Management
(LGIM), it was case of both.
“When I came here, I was actually quite surprised
that the amount we are transacting runs to trillions
of pounds on an annual basis,” he says. “I view the
UK’s GDP as good contextual metric and on an annual
basis we are trading multiples of that, so it is a serious
business and it comes with a great deal of responsibili-
ty. What I have seen in the three years that I have been
here is that that business has been growing as well,
and it is a broad-based growth.”
Growth plays a significant part of Wicks’ mandate at
LGIM and so far, he has taken to the task of building
out the firm’s scope with a healthy gusto. Having start-
ed his career at one of the world’s largest investment
banks in JP Morgan before joining the buy-side with
BlackRock, Wicks is well-versed as to how vital scale
is to a business that is constantly aspring to the next
level.
Wicks places a high emphasis on incremental
improvement, whether it be on his team’s work or
LGIM’s trading processes, and his record with the firm
since joining in 2015 speaks for itself. Initially respon-
sible for LGIM’s equity trading, Wicks’ role was then
expanded to cover equities on a global scale before
being handed the role of global head of trading across
all asset classes last year.
“We have a vast breadth of assets that we trade
and each of those assets are growing, both in terms
of notional turnover on an annual basis and also the
52 // TheTrade // Winter 2018
number of tickets, which is almost
more important from my position,”
he says. “I need to make sure that
we have the appropriate execution
arrangements to manage not just
the initial size of the book.”
Going global
As his remit has expanded, so too
has Wicks’ ability to effect change
on LGIM’s trading operations,
although he stresses that like other
asset managers, the firm is not
in a position to hire a team of 20
new traders and therefore must
work more intelligently with the
resources at its disposal.
One of the first items on Wicks’
agenda was to implement what
he describes as a “truly global
operating model” by establishing
a new trading desk in Hong Kong
as LGIM’s hub for the Asia-Pacific
region at the start of 2017, a crucial
element that was previously miss-
ing from the firm’s set-up.
“We have centralised trading in
all three regions and we are able to
operate a full pass-the-book model,
which means we can leverage the
regional trading desks to make sure
we are not snowed under here in
London, which is a very import-
ant aspect,” Wicks explains. “To
deal with that size of book I felt
we needed a more robust global