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and post-trade analytics. It is truly groundbreaking and allows you to gain productivity and focus more than in other areas that require your time. Other than that, the integration of real-time market data directly into our execution management system( EMS) is important. It sounds straightforward, but the practical impact is significant. The main challenge is to be able to adapt your strategy based on the market conditions you’ re facing, not the ones you anticipated. Our EMS allows us to continuously reassess our addressable liquidity and adapt accordingly by switching algos, adjusting participation rates or routing to different venues.
Where do you see the biggest liquidity challenges for buy-side traders today? I speak more from the European buy-side perspective. The biggest challenge today is understanding and finding the addressable liquidity you actually have access to. The market is highly fragmented, and in those conditions, you can struggle to find real liquidity and assess the impact your trading will have, as liquidity is often poly-reported or opaque. Once you’ ve identified the addressable liquidity available to you, the second challenge is gaining access to non-toxic liquidity, and finding the best possible liquidity- the cleanest liquidity possible.
For me, the key is trying to source as much OTC liquidity as possible, whether directly from buy-side to buy-side or via retail flow.
Having strong relationships with your broker network not only gives you access to liquidity but provides a good understanding of where the market is, where the paired liquidity is, and allows you to gain market intelligence that you can use in your execution process afterward.
Misjudging those two factors doesn’ t just mean a bad execution but it means moving the market against yourself and allowing others to take advantage. Therefore, a consistent post-trade TCA becomes essential, it allows you to assess which counterparties and venues give you the cleanest flow and so you can adapt your pre-trade decision making.
The year has kicked off with bouts of market turbulence and volatility- how do you adapt execution strategies during stressed market conditions? From our side, what we are seeing is that execution becomes slower and more costly during periods of high market volatility as the liquidity available in the lit market keeps deteriorating.
The first focus therefore is on managing time risk within execution. That means moving toward OTC liquidity through blocks or other mechanisms. The second thing is adapting the list of counterparties and venues you use, selecting venues that are able to absorb larger portions of liquidity without leaking information to the market or creating adverse selection.
We also become more proactive in the execution itself. During these periods, because of time risk, we have found that crossing the spread and being slightly more aggressive with execution can ultimately be cheaper than remaining passive.
Post-trade TCA is also very important and determine conditions such as validating your decisions, to then be able to modify your approach to the market.
" Having strong relationships with your broker network not only gives you access to liquidity but provides a good understanding of where the market is, where the paired liquidity is, and allows you to gain market intelligence that you can use in your execution process afterward."
40 // TheTRADE // Q2 2026