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“ I was used to the UK buy-side desk . We started to remove the processes of passing the whole working order to the broker and began looking for the big liquidity in different places and trading based on merit and the volume they could source . Although we ’ re based in Spain , in many ways we trade as though we are a London buy-side desk in Madrid .”
Switching up strategy For Roselló and Iglesias , the transition to remote trading due to the global coronavirus pandemic was somewhat more critical than for firms with a larger team of traders given the difficulty if both were to fall ill at the same time . While though adapting to working from home was relatively smooth , contending with intense market volatility and additional funds from the Fidentiis merger , which doubled the number of orders that needed executing and increased their notional volume by more than 50 %, proved more challenging .
Although blocks in conditional crossing networks increased in the early stages of the volatility , the traders found it difficult to convince high-touch traders to cross as they preferred to execute small blocks and trade over the session . This improved in the months after summer in 2020 , but it forced Roselló and Iglesias to rethink their strategy on the algorithms they used to improve and speed up their liquidity seeking processes .
“ We were trading more electronic at first , including blocks in crossing networks . In the beginning it became more difficult to reach people on the high-touch side and we often heard about working from home as an excuse for delays ,” Roselló says .
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