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manager is a testament to its culture. As the third person to join fixed income international at T. Rowe Price and the first trader to join fixed income, he’ s seen many of the team through from their first day.
“ I like to say that I ' ve trained everyone in FX along the journey.”
The FX trading team favours a mixed approached of high or no touch when it comes to execution. High touch being algorithmically traded and no touch being auto priced and executed, with no intervention bar the necessary tolerance checks.
“ The idea being that trades arrive on the traders’ blotters and we can seek to gain alpha. If we can ' t then they ' re going to get put through the automation route,” says Baker.
“ There is not a great deal of value we can add on that [ automated ] ticket. The high touch orders are the ones where we use algos. They ' re probably something that is a larger size than we deem auto priceable. With an algo, the buy-side trader is in complete control. You ' ve only got yourself to blame if it ' s a good or bad performance. It ' s a bit like going to a restaurant with a hot plate, cooking your own steak and then moaning afterwards that you ' ve overcooked it.”
“ The risk now for the industry is that no one wants to pick up the phone anymore and you lose the edge of speaking to a salesperson or a trader and hearing their voice on what you ' re trying to give them. We ' ve made it so‘ push button’ that we ' ve lost the trader ' s edge of understanding what we ' re trying to give to the street.”
Workflow optimisation Baker, like many in his seat, spends a large portion of his time assessing how the desk might further optimise its workflows to give traders more time to spend on the trades that generate the most alpha for their clients.
“ I ' ve been trading the same way, buying and selling for the last 30 years and we will continue to do that for the next hundred years, but there are different ways of executing and getting different outcomes,” he says.
As a real money shop that trades on behalf of clients as opposed to its own book, T. Rowe Price isn’ t able to use some of the workflows that other firms on the street, for example hedge funds, leverage to simplify their operations. But, in an ideal world, this is something Baker would like to
“ I like to have a clear blotter when I arrive at work and I like to have a clear blotter when I leave.”
achieve to speed up the counterparty onboarding process.
“ I would love T. Rowe Price to have the ability to trade like a hedge fund, not in the way that they execute, but just have the ability to trade with who they want, when they want,” he says.
“ Hedge funds have it easy because they can trade in their own name and they have prime brokerage. Whereas T. Rowe Price trades on behalf of our clients and we have to have tri-party relationships with the clients and the counterparties in terms of ISDA( International Swaps and Derivatives Association) documentation. Anything that involves an ISDA generally involves legal counsel. That slows the speed of [ counterparty ] onboarding.”
Like many heads of trading, Baker is responsible for keeping tabs on new innovations coming to market that may simplify workflows on the desk. His mantra? Try before you buy.
“ Never be afraid to try before you buy, and you don ' t have to buy,” he explains.“ There ' s a lot out there doing the same thing. It ' s important to try and differentiate and not to waste too much time.
18 // TheTRADE // Q2 2025