29
Aug
Join Firm58 at the Upcoming MarketsMedia Event in Chicago
Firm58 is pleased to once again co-sponsor the MarketsMedia Chicago Trading and Investing Summit 2011. The event takes place on Thursday, October 6 at The Conrad Hotel. MarketsMedia has a great program lined up for the afternoon and evening. If you are interested in attending, please contact MarketsMedia or contact us at marketing@firm58.com and we may be able to help. We look forward to seeing you there in October.
2
Nov
Firm58 at FIA and CTA Expos this week
The next few days will be jam-packed with conference-related goodness. Every year, thousands of financial services professionals descend on the Chicago HIlton for the annual FIA Expo. This year, the 26th annual Futures & Options Expo will attract more than 5,000 people from 30 countries. Attendees range from senior staff at brokerage firms and exchanges to floor traders, pension fund managers, corporate treasurers, CTAs and CPOs, and individual investors.
Firm58 will be attending the conference and expo, as well as a number of the associated events including the Women in Listed Derivatives (WILD) breakfast at Ceres on November 5th.
If you’d like to schedule time to meet with Sam Mele or Steve Pickett at the FIA Expo, drop us a note.
Concurrent with FIA Expo is the CTA Expo across town at the newly renovated Embassy Suites hotel. Firm58 is sponsoring this event and reps will be on hand to answer questions throughout the day.
Join us for a breakout session on Wednesday, November 3rd at 1:30 p.m. in the Rock River room where we will discuss our Managed Futures offering and snack on delicious cookies. It’s not too late to RSVP. We hope to see you there!
14
Oct
Market Structure Changes Post Trade Needs
Over 5 years ago when our founders created Firm58, one of the core principles was that changing market structure (i.e., more trading venues, digitization, etc…) was making post trade financial analysis & reporting exponentially more complex. They were clearly right. Everyone knows how hard it is to, daily, look at your OMS records, your clearing files and try to reconcile what happened across which “markets” and at what fee/rebate. Customers demand more transparency into their trade activity. Companies are scrambling at best to keep up. The largest brokerages are scrambling to make sense of all this post trade data in order to reduce their Brokerage, Clearing and Execution costs, which typically represent the 2nd or 3rd largest spend in their organizations.
While I was at the Rosenblatt Financial Technology Summit in New York two weeks ago, Joe Gawronski (President) and Justin Schack (Director of Market Structure Analysis) led off the conference with a talk on regulatory reform and the impact on competition in the industry. In that talk they reviewed some of the historical facts that have lead to today’s market structure. In particular, two slides (shown here) detail the changes in market structure from 1997 to now, and put some hard facts around this problem of market fragmentation and complexity. The duopoly in US Equity Markets we knew 13 years ago has been replaced with at least nine market places or venues making up almost 98% of the volume.
What does that mean for you? As we’ve been saying for years, if you’re a brokerage of any size, and you’re trying reconcile monthly exchange invoices and fees against your daily trading activity, good luck. Spreadsheets and MBA’s are working overtime to give you (at best) averages and a high level view of the business. Granular trade by trade analysis, and detailed views of clients is impossible without a system to help you. With the pending changes in regulations and compliance around trade detail and transparency you will clearly be at risk.
8
Oct
Firm58 at the Chicago Trading & Investing Summit 2010
Firm58 joins Lightspeed Trading as a sponsor of the 3rd annual Market Media’s Chicago Trading & Investing Summit on October 14th at the Conrad Hotel.
Firm58ers will be on hand to answer questions about our solutions and our co-founder and CTO, Jim Mullen, will participate in a panel discussion titled, Proprietary Trading evolves in the High Frequency World. Panelists include Andrew Actman, Chief Strategy Officer, Lightspeed Financial; Evan McDaniel, Derivatives Trader, Riverbank Capital; Nehal Kenia, Director of Product Management, Options, Lime Brokerage LLC; and Eric Davidson, Executive Vice President, Titan Trading USA.
Event topics will cover:
- The Clearing Debate: OTC versus listed products; the clearing arms race continues; how will proposed regulation affect the derivatives market?
- Platforms: new entrants enter the fray, existing ones innovate; is there call for consolidation? How strong is the case for a single, multi-asset class trading platform?
- The Role of the 21st Century Trader: what’s next for market makers? the rejuvenation of the floor broker; how has the role of the prop trader changed?
- Institutional Derivatives Trading & Investing: how are institutional derivatives traders adopting to a reshaped trading and investing landscape?
- Next Generation Technology: speed, access, latency and execution.
A networking reception will follow this full day of panels.
If you are interested in attending the event, contact Danielle Hall, Conference Manager
Ph: (646) 442-4645 | Email: danielle@marketsmediallc.com
24
Sep
Firm58 at Rosenblatt’s 2nd Annual Financial Technology Summit
Next week I’ve been asked to attend the 2nd Annual Financial Technology Summit in New York put on by Rosenblatt Securities. Thanks to Vikas Shah and the team at Rosenblatt Securities for inviting me to the event. I’m really looking forward to it.
I will be part of a panel discussion that day entitled: Demystifying Post-Trade: Understanding back office innovations can pay dividends. We’ll be discussing the shifts in regulations and compliance, along with the ever changing demands of customers for greater transparency into their trading fees. With transaction volume and commission dollars shrinking, and with regulations and compliance increasing the demands on trade by trade transparency, there’s a bigger requirement on the sell-side to more accurately and more timely process, account for and report on daily trading activity, including the measurement of client profitability.
The panel is going to dive into the post-trade problems and discuss potential solutions. It’s next Thursday, September 30th in New York and I’m sure I’ll post some comments here after the event.
15
Sep
Surviving in a competitive capital markets environment: A Firm58 live webinar with Larry Tabb
Next week Tabb Group and Firm58 are hosting a webinar (Tuesday, September 21 @ 1pm ET) discussing the new brokerage relationship and the importance of capturing the right costs/fees and measuring client profitability, accurately.
For many years it’s been standard practice for brokerages to charge their trading customers some average mil rate and hope this covers the cost of doing business across all clients, even if some are unprofitable and others are unfairly overcharged as a result. This has left a brokerage’s revenue “unprotected.” As a result, profitable clients leave for better business relationships and unprofitable clients demand more services…at a loss.
Further, as clients have become more sophisticated and request arrangements like “cost-plus” billing, or do business with a bank across multiple asset classes, this method of average costing is misleading banks as to the profitability of a client, and regularly results in the distribution of even more services to underperforming, or unprofitable clients. In today’s economic and political environment, this is a recipe for business disaster. Leading firms are already addressing these issues.
When you compare these costs today, the 2nd or 3rd largest expense in any financial institution is its Brokerage, Clearing & Execution (BCE). In addition, the explosion of new markets (or trading venues) and the complexity of calculating fees or commissions, including commissions for adding liquidity, has made the effort to accurately capture and apply these costs across multiple client accounts almost impossible.
The webinar highlights the problems for firms ignoring the warning signs. Competition is eating away at firms that cannot accurately calculate and manage the cost of their trading clients. The webinar will also offer suggestions to address this critical need.
Not surprisingly, Firm58 is helping many firms with the technology behind this complex problem. Firm58 can help firms manage their costs more accurately and Protect their Revenue streams more proactively, thus enhancing their competitive positions in any market.
