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“Feeding the Future”, an agricultural innovation report supported by the Technology Strategy Board, sets outs Britain’s future food production challenges up to 2030.
The Feeding the Future concept grew from the need for a coherent high-level research and development (R&D) strategy for UK agriculture and horticulture, that could better leverage the value of public and private sector R&D spending.
It is also the aim to help the food industry meet the challenges set out in the government’s foresight report into the future of food and farming, published in January 2011.
Five organisations have joined together to work
Interview with Chris Jenkins, managing director, Tora Trading Asia
What is toxicity and how is it measured?
Toxicity in trading terms is defined as the quality of executions in a trading venue. Toxicity analysis is a critical tool for shedding light on the value that an alternative liquidity pools can bring to the investment process. It is measured by comparing the price of executions achieved in a pool with executions occurring immediately before and after those in the primary market. Toxicity analysis and results are generally consistent across all timeframes.
While each pool has monthly variations in their toxicity levels,
By James Williams – With dark pools appearing a lot more in media headlines this year, understanding some of the benefits, and risks, for institutions who have yet to fully engage with them, is vital.
Such has been the media coverage recently that last month Credit Suisse took the decision to stop publishing data on their CrossFinder dark pool to Rosenblatt Securities. In the context of whether dark pools are good or bad, the decision was perhaps understandable given that CrossFinder is the largest dark pool in the US.
And, staying out of the spotlight illustrates one of the core advantages
BI-SAM, a provider of data management, performance, attribution, risk, composites and reporting solutions for the global asset management industry, is expanding operations in London and moving to a new location.
BI-SAM’s B-One platform establishes a source of master data for producing time series performance returns and reports, delivers a comprehensive level of performance measurement and attribution analysis in terms of quality of output, content and timeliness, while offering customers maximum scalability.
“Since the start of 2013, we have seen an increase of 33 per cent in our UK customer base and we expect this trend to continue,” says
The decision for Société Générale to launch a dark pool trading platform, AlphaY, in April 2012 arose from a desire to access liquidity in a safe environment that the firm felt was not readily available externally.
Prior to launching AlphaY, SocGen’s analysis of dark pools led to it developing a series of measures to analyse liquidity toxicity. Each trading venue’s liquidity was profiled to create a liquidity spectrum ranging from safe to toxic. These measures convinced SocGen that there was a gap in the quality of dark pool liquidity and as Mark Goodman (pictured), head of quantitative electronic services, explains:
Under current MiFID regulation, pre-trade transparency waivers are used to allow non-displayed trading venues to forego the need to publish bids and offers prior to execution. With average trade size falling on these venues, often referred to as dark pools, there is a feeling among regulators and indeed exchanges, that these venues are having a negative impact on price discovery and liquidity.
The danger, however, of reneging or capping volumes traded under these waivers and applying potentially broad-based regulation under MiFIR, is that all dark venues will be treated the same. In reality, they differ widely in concept, market model,
By James Williams – Dark pools exist in a variety of forms to serve a variety of clients. In the US they are referred to as an alternative trading system (ATS). In Europe they include multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) – alternative trading venues that sprang out of MiFID regulation in 2007 – broker-owned pools called Broker Crossing Networks (BCNs) or “internalisers”. Not to mention independent dark pool operators like Liquidnet that connect buy-side to buy-side institutions.
The number of dark pool venues that now exist has risen considerably: it is estimated that there are some 45 such venues in the
AmBank Berhad, part of Malaysia’s AmBank Group, has gone live with the latest version of Murex’s MX.3 Market Risk Solution.
This new market risk implementation enables the bank to enhance oversight of its risk management activities across all fixed income businesses and strengthens the bank’s ability to meet increased domestic regulatory and reporting requirements.
“A thorough due diligence and proof of concept preceded our decision to shift away from our former system to Murex whose capabilities we were already familiar with. Besides the benefits of leveraging current installations, we wanted to make sure this new risk installation will
All seven of IndexIQ’s hedge fund and alternative beta replication indices saw negative performance in May.
Designed as investable benchmarks that replicate the performance characteristics of sophisticated hedge fund strategies, the IQ Hedge benchmark indexes underlie a variety of investment products globally including ETFs, mutual funds, and institutional accounts.
The IQ Hedge Emerging Markets Beta Index was the biggest loser last month, down 1.97 per cent, followed by IQ Hedge Market Neutral Beta Index (-1.38 per cent), IQ Hedge Composite Beta Index (-1.06 per cent), IQ Hedge Event-Driven Beta Index and IQ Hedge Global Macro Beta Index (both −1.04
KPMG, the US audit, tax and advisory firm, is adding more depth to its alternative investments practice by hiring Constance Hunter, an economic thought leader and former portfolio manager, as its chief economist, alternative investments.
In this newly created position, Hunter (pictured), who is based in New York, will work with the firm’s global alternative investments leadership team to play a key role in economic forecasting, planning and strategy, and client relationship development.
"Many financial services companies are struggling to understand the impact that current economic and geo-political developments will have on their businesses and their customers," says
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