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Citi’s Salvador Rodriguez and Daniel Mathews explain how best execution has evolved alongside MiFID and how the latest proposals are likely to affect buy-side and sell-side trading desks.

How is best execution under MiFID II different from MiFID I and from pre-MiFID? Where have we come?

Daniel Mathews, Citi: Although we are referring to MiFID II, we are at the early stages of the MiFID II legislative drafting process. The European Commission (EC) published its proposals last October,T and there will be a number of amendments proposed by the European Parliament over the coming months. The Council of the European Union (EU) will also table amendments and ensuing agreement between the EC, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU (27 member states) will then be required. It is not yet clear what MiFID II and MiFIR will look like in final form as there are a number of key areas which are acknowledged by both sides to need addressing. What is clear is that there will be significant changes to the drafting that is on the table at present.

Salvador Rodriguez, Citi: With the MiFID II process we have seen closer alignment between buy-side and sell-side interests. There is more cooperation between the buy-side and sell-side with a view to what may or may not come out of MiFID II; and this in itself, is a clear improvement from the earlier iterations, which is encouraging for the business at large.

DM: Certainly, the meetings we have had with the buy-side indicate that they are taking far more interest in what MiFID II will mean for them; they want to participate in the debate and are keen to understand what we are doing from a sell-side perspective.

Tools and strategies that have become accepted best execution for many brokers are now under review (e.g. broker crossing and the Systemic Internaliser (SI) regime). How difficult will it be to provide comparable offerings within the SI framework?

DM: One of the current challenges is understanding how the SI regime will operate under Ferber’s proposals and understanding the unintended (or intended) consequences of the amendments, such as ‘all OTC trades must be conducted under the SI regime’. The scope of the SI only extends to liquid stocks, so what happens to non-liquid stocks? Can we trade them outside an SI? Will all risk trades need to be executed within SI and therefore within published firm quotes, even though a risk trades to client may warrant a price outside firm quotes? At the moment, there are many unanswered questions raised from Ferber’s proposals concerning what the SI regime actually means for us and our clients.

SR: As Dan has alluded to, many of the requirements have fallen into the lap of the sell-side. From a trader’s point of view, the tools, strategies and decisions around how to execute a trade will probably not change significantly. Traders will continue to send VWAP or participate with volume-type orders. Naturally, there are pending questions around how risk is employed and whether firm capital can be used within an OTF environment. As a broader business, how clients and orders interact with risk, and how we internalize house flow, are wide-ranging questions. There is no one clear answer; it is a multi-layered problem and there are still grey areas to be resolved.

From which of the MiFID updates will institutional investors notice the biggest change in execution quality and/or strategy?

SR: The MiFID proposals will clearly affect everyone. Under the Commission’s proposals, a BCN would be an OTF and an SI is not a venue. I think this needs to be unpacked. Legally the classifications are fairly clear – you can trade on either a trading venue (RM, MTF, OTF) or OTC and if the latter then to the extent the trading is systematic and frequent then the firm must be an SI. As Dan says though, Ferber’s amendments have muddied the waters so that it’s not clear how an SI is intended to function. Our job is to figure this out through dialogue with our buy-side clients, and we have been seeing many of them recently on market structure road shows, explaining where the current process is at and the areas still to be resolved.

Simo Puhakka, Head of Trading for Pohjola Asset Management, shares his experience trading in the Nordic markets, giving his opinions on interacting with HFT, using TCA and knowing whether you can trust your broker.
 
Nordic HFT
The prospects for High Frequency Trading (HFT) are really up to regulators. It will be a free market, but as we all know, regulatory changes affect the whole trading landscape. For example, we can see what is happening in France and the debate that is going on in Sweden, which are quite hostile towards HFT, so those countries.
 
Personally, I think that HFT is a good thing for the market, as long as you have the proper tools to deal with it. There are a number of small firms that have been suffering from HFT
since MiFID I because they lack the proper technology and tools to measure and deal with it. We have not suffered in our dealings with HFT, and I would actually say in many cases, it is the opposite. HFT firms seem to add liquidity and when you have the proper tools to deal with it, you can take advantage of it. 
 
Speaking of tools, we started building our own Smart Order Router (SOR ) a year and a half ago. The goal was to create an un-conflicted way to interact with the aggregated liquidity. In this process we went quite deep into the data and turned processes upside-down with the result that we have full control of how we interact with the market. 
 
On the other hand, I welcome technological innovation from the sell-side; for example, brokers now disclose the venues where they execute trades on an annual basis. The surveillance responsibilities that brokers have are beneficial. Many of the small, local brokers and buy-sides, however, are now finding it challenging to upgrade their technology. 
 
Trusting your Broker
Our approach was to take control of our order flow and only use our brokers for sponsored access. We chose full control because, in some to deliver  what I am asking.These questions first arose a few years ago, and we realized we needed to create a transparent, fully-controlled, non-conflicted path to the market. How you interact with different venues – even lit venues, where you have more transparency – will affect your choice of strategy. In most cases, you are better off without brokers making decisions for you. The root of the problem is, when you send an order to the broker, what happens before it goes to the venue? What control do we have over the broker infrastructure, including their proprietary flow, internalization, market making and crossing, not to mention the routing logic?
 
 When we dug into the data, we were quite surprised to see that, although a broker was connected to all the dark liquidity, many of the fills were coming from that particular broker’s dark pool, suggesting there are preferences in the routing logic. Brokers want to internalize flow, which is not a problem, if you are aware of potentially higher opportunity costs. When it comes to dark liquidity, that is an even bigger problem, since our trades were often routed to the broker’s own dark pool or those it has arrangements with. 

RCM’s Head of Asia Pacific Trading, Kent Rossiter, unmasks the Asian trading scene, sharing insights into how RCM navigates the unlit landscape, identifying the effects of dark liquidity and highlighting ways brokers can facilitate better buy-side decision making.

FIXGlobal: What are the main benefits of dark liquidity in Asia?

Kent Rossiter, RCM: One of the major challenges in Asia has always been accessing liquidity without other parties in the market taking advantage of your position and your need to complete the order. In cases where liquidity is scarce, knowledge that a relatively large order is being worked can expose investors to various risks. In such situations, it is  advantageous for knowledge of the deal whilst it is being worked to be discreet until the order is filled. In dark pools run by brokers we can get priority on our orders through queue-jumping.

Kent Rossiter, Head of Trading, RCMDark pools support such an approach as they allow large block orders to be worked without showing size. In this way, trading in dark pools allows a trader to access a broker’s own internal order flow, without being gamed by the market that would otherwise risk non-fulfillment or less efficient pricing. As a result, size trading becomes the norm in dark pools and a trader gets to see blocks that may never have been available otherwise. With no information leakage we are not disadvantaged by the fading you see on lit venue quotes. From a personal perspective, the challenges that arise from dealing across a number of venues and the resulting increased use of technology make the role more exciting and satisfying.

FG: How do you limit information leakage in dark pools?

KR: With the exception of broker internalization engines, the trade sizes found in dark pools are often multiple of what they are on the exchange. So having fewer, but larger prints reduces information leakage, and in many cases we can get done on our size right away. Minimizing the number of times a print hits the tape reduces the chance of this footprint being picked up and working against the balance of your order. That said, broker internalization engines do their part well, keeping any spread savings among the two broker’s clients instead of giving it up to the general market.

FG: If you decide to seek dark liquidity, how do you decide between broker internalizers and block crossing networks?

KR: The type of dark venues being used for various trades (i.e. between block crossing networks and brokers) are different. As I mentioned, brokers for the most part are matching up little prints that otherwise would have been time-sliced in the general market, and when using these venues the goal is often to save a few basis points along the way while you work an order. You are not often micro-managing each fill, but through the process we are getting spread capture and price improvement. The type of stock you are often trading in these internalization engines are often larger, more liquid stocks; the type of orders often worked by algos.

Block crossing networks on the other hand, while still matching up electronically, are probably more confidential, and take up the function of what brokers still do upstairs - putting blocks together - so size is the real focus here. Both types of dark pools use the primary market for price sourcing since the vast majority of trades get printed at or within the best bid and offer. As the primary markets become too thin, it can cause price formation problems.

While it is not specific to the consideration of dark pools as an extra execution venue, we have to consider potential increased book out costs if we do use dark pools (except via aggregators, since we would only be using one counterparty), just as we have had to for years when deciding whether to execute a block with a single broker versus multiple counterparties. As dark pools proliferate there is an increased chance that we may not have part of our order in that pool at just the right time to take advantage of flow that may be parked there. Dark pool aggregators are aiming to provide the buy-side solutions to this.

ITG’s Clare Rowsell and Rob Boardman outline the best practices for liquidity management across multiple regions, focusing on Asia Pacific, North America and Europe.

In an increasingly global and fragmented trading environment, finding and managing liquidity is the top priority for buy-side traders. The practicalities of doing so are complex, and are underpinned by the tradeoff between the time taken to find liquidity – which can result in delay costs as the price moves away, and the quality of that liquidity – trading against certain counterparties can increase market impact costs. Meanwhile, the global liquidity environment is changing rapidly due to evolving regulation, market structure and the trading tools available. What follows is a short summary of some of the most significant developments affecting liquidity management in different regions around the world.

Asia Pacific

Often cited as having a ‘last mover advantage’ in coming latest to the world of dark pools and alternative trading venues, Asia is now catching up rapidly. Growing awareness of the region’s higher trading costs (approximately one third higher than those of the US and UK) is creating market demand for both new lit and dark liquidity sources. Japan is the only major market that currently allows ‘lit’ or quote-publishing venues to compete directly with the exchanges, and in the past year market share on these venues (including SBI Japannext, Chi-X and Kabu.com) has risen, although they still average around 2-3% of total turnover.

Australia will be next, now that the launch of Chi-X to challenge the ASX exchange’s monopoly has been confirmed for early in Quarter 4 2011. As alternative lit venues develop, the importance of smart order routing grows and in Australia this has been a core component of consultation which will result in changes to regulation affecting brokers and exchanges and mandating Smart Order Routing (SOR) as a mechanism to achieve best price in a multi-market environment. For other Asian markets, buy-side traders have been turning to dark pools as a way of managing trading costs and finding quality liquidity.

Most of the large banks and brokers now offer a dark pool or internalization engine in markets including Hong Kong, Japan and Australia; but given Asia’s already-fragmented market structures, adding more broker liquidity pools threatens to complicate the buy-side trader’s life. This is where liquidity management, and specifically the aggregation of dark pools, is coming to the fore. Increasingly the buy-side are turning to dark pool aggregating algorithms to connect into multiple sources of liquidity through one access point.

Canada

Canada has long benefited from trading in an auction market supported by a highly visible electronic book. Even though it was not until the latter half of the decade that ATSs began to spring up in Canada, they quickly gained traction and in 2010 ATSs represented 34% of volume. As these changes have taken place, Canadian regulators have continually reviewed emerging regulation in other regions as Canada continues to parallel more mature markets. With the proliferation of alternative trading venues came an emphasis on the consolidation of data to ensure market integrity. In addressing the need for a consolidated tape, the CSA accepted RFPs and appointed the TMX Group to the role of Information Processor.

Also arising from the multiple-market trading environment is Reg.NMS-style regulations to protect against trade-throughs. February’s Order Protection Rule shifted the best price responsibility to marketplaces and also requires full depth of book protection (unlike the US’s top of book protection). About 3% of Canada’s equity trading is done in dark pools, and although Canada has only two dark pools (Liquidnet Canada and ITG’s MATCH NowSM), Instinet plans to open two this year and Canadian stock exchanges are making moves to offer dark order types.