Our recent report, “Equity Trade Commissions: Rates Vary Broadly Across and Within Markets,” highlighted an interesting finding from a Greenwich Associates study: average bundled commission rates on equity trades are surprisingly consistent across...

Larger institutions in Japan now execute only roughly 41% of trades as traditional single stock high-touch trades, well down from 48% in 2011. This reflects low touch single stock trades rising from 33% of trading volume to 36% and an expected 40%...

Institutions in Asia are executing a steadily increasing proportion of business on a low-touch basis (algorithms, DMA, crossing, portfolio trades) as opposed to traditional high-touch business executed through a broker sales trader. These same...

The European Commission, ESMA and the FCA appear to be including fixed income in new payment for research requirements in MiFID II and EMiR by not explicitly excluding fixed income research. The question is whether a service can be viewed as an...

We might be getting a little bit closer to understanding whether or not the changes in the capital markets are cyclical or structural.  We view volatility - or the lack thereof - as a major factor impacting profitability across financial...

Market structure happenings have been fast and furious since 2009, and 2014 did not disappoint.  Mandatory SEF trading finally began, fixed income electronic trading continued its steady incline, the current shape of the US equity market was...

Another year down. We're a year further from the Lehman bankruptcy, a year further from the signing of Dodd-Frank and a year closer to the full implementation of Basel III. But before we start looking ahead, let's look back at the year in market...

I’m not a great fan of regulation for regulation’s sake. While this is too strong and cursory a judgment on what has been happening in the US and Europe for the past few years, some suggested regulatory changes make you wonder. For instance,...

Sales trader relevance has been debated for more than a decade as buy-side driven execution algorithms and trading tools have made self-service trading ubiquitous. Despite the ability of institutional investors to trade via cheaper self-directed...

Greenwich Associates (and I) have for the most part stayed out of the recent high frequency trading debate. Thankfully the discussion has gone (somewhat) beyond whether HFT is good or bad and has moved towards a broader debate around the best market...