Solutions
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has begun publishing public information on over-the-counter (OTC) interest rates trades.
The interest rate data join public data on OTC credit derivatives that are provided on DTCC’s web site. Interest rates make up the largest single segment of OTC derivatives, with more than $570 trillion gross notional value composed of 4.5 million in interest rate contracts outstanding.
The public data on interest rates trades will be posted weekly on DTCC’s website at www.dtcc.com and will include aggregated, anonymous position data for all interest rate products, with breakdowns by currency, maturity, sub-product and
NYSE Technologies and Americas Trading Group (ATG) have launched their high-performance order routing and market-data platform offering the global trading community low-latency access to the key trading venues in Latin America.
Leveraging NYSE Technologies’ Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI), the network connection delivers the lowest possible latency between New York and Sao Paulo.
Now the Global Capital Markets Community can leverage their existing SFTI connectivity to access ATG’s sponsored access gateways for direct order routing to Latin American exchanges and brokers. Market data from key global financial markets is also available to clients in Latin America while Latin American market
Northern Trust Hedge Fund Services LLC, is actively working with its private fund clients to provide the data necessary for Form PF reporting.
With Northern Trust’s single, global platform for operations and flexible data management capabilities, Northern Trust Hedge Fund Services is able to present portfolio and trade information as well as risk data from outside providers in a format suitable for Form PF reporting, a regulatory filing required of hedge funds, private equity and other private funds beginning this year.
"While Form PF presents a new requirement to our private fund clients, the data aggregation and regulatory expertise necessary
NICE Actimize, provider of a single financial crime, risk and compliance software platform for the financial services industry, has launched a comprehensive hedge fund trading compliance solution designed to monitor the activities of hedge funds across all cash market and derivative asset classes (exchange-traded and OTC).
NICE Actimize provides multiple deployment options, including on-premise, as well as hosting in a secure data center as an alternative delivery mechanism to help firms reduce the cost of operating and maintaining software in-house and acquiring market data.
The Actimize Hedge Fund Trading Compliance solution, based on a variation of existing market-proven NICE Actimize
Most of the corporate interest rate derivatives users participating in Greenwich Associates’ most recent Global Interest Rate Derivatives Study believe that new Basel 2.5 and III derivatives regulations in Europe and the United States will result in wider spreads in derivatives markets and ultimately increase their costs of capital.
There is much less consensus that these new margin requirements and revised capital reserve requirements on banks will affect trading practices or hedging strategies.
Overall, a plurality of interest rate derivatives users think the new capital requirements regarding derivatives trading will have little to no impact on current practices, or
Dexion Capital is planning to list a new investment company, DCG IRIS Limited, on the London Stock Exchange.
DCG IRIS Limited is a proposed new London-listed, closed-end investment company seeking attractive returns from insurance linked strategies (ILS). The IPO is scheduled to close mid June 2012
The Company will access a highly diversified portfolio of catastrophe risks with a target net return of LIBOR +5% to 7% and annual volatility of 2 to 4%, by investing in CS IRIS Low Volatility Plus Fund (the ‘Master Fund’), managed by Credit Suisse.
The Company has an initial dividend target of 5% per
Momentum trading strategies in foreign exchange markets yield “striking” excess returns of up to 10 per cent a year, according to a new study.
‘Cross-sectional strategies’ – where investors go long or short on a basket of currencies based on their past performance – yield the highest returns, even when accounting for transaction costs.
The findings come from a new study, due to be published in the Journal of Financial Economics, which analysed 48 currencies against the US dollar from 1976 to 2010. The research provides the most comprehensive analysis of momentum risk and returns in currency markets to date.
The CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE) and DRW Trading Group have completed an agreement that will allow CFE to use DRW’s patent-pending methodology to create variance futures that match the quoting conventions and economic performance of over-the-counter (OTC) stock index variance swaps.
CFE plans to introduce a new futures contract based on the variance of the S&P 500 (SPX) later this year, subject to regulatory approval.
Variance swaps measure the difference between the expected and actual variance of an underlying instrument over a fixed time period. Currently, variance swaps on the S&P 500 index are estimated to trade USD10 million vega
State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) has launched two currency investment strategies on Deutsche Bank’s dbSelect, its platform for accessing liquid hedge fund strategies.
The move allows investors to access SSgA’s Developed Markets Currency and Emerging Markets Currency strategies in a transparent, liquid and efficient manner through Deutsche Bank’s dbSelect platform. Managed investment platforms allow hedge fund managers to offer multiple ways of accessing investment strategies, whilst reducing counterparty risk and increasing liquidity for investors.
SSgA has extensive experience in evaluating currency markets through active and passive currency management. SSgA’s Developed Markets Currency and Emerging Markets Currency strategies target returns from
ULLINK, a provider of connectivity and trading solutions for the global financial community, has released the latest and fastest version of its flagship product, UL BRIDGE 4.
UL BRIDGE 4 doubled the latency reduction from its predecessor while increasing message throughput and approaching hardware based technologies performances. All business processes available on UL BRIDGE will take advantage of these enhancements, including but not limited to the library of 70 market gateways, the library of 500 adaptors to the trading systems of the world, the pre trade risk applications (UL IRIS), the smart order router (UL SMART) and the algorithms (UL
