Turned out the first week of mandatory SEF trading was a Big Bang, just in the wrong direction. Reported SEF volumes for interest rate swaps fell off a cliff for the week of February 17th, cliff signdropping 64% (revised down slightly as new data...

Tuesday February 18th is certainly a big deal. Requiring swaps to trade on registered platforms was one of the primary tenets of derivatives reform since shortly after the Lehman big bang theory bankruptcy, and finally the day has arrived. This is...

Its true. If you step back and think about it for a minute, the work carried out over the past four years to create an electronic swaps metia-logomarket almost from scratch is pretty amazing. PR Metia just released their FinTech Insight 2014 report...

The CFTC is great at sending emails out at inopportune times. In this case it was the 13 no-action letters sent between December 20th chicagoand December 31th while most of the financial world was trying to take a deep breath and enjoy some time off...

The year 2013 will likely go down as the year of mandatory clearing. Once ignored by eager financial market Greenwich Associatesprofessionals as boring back-office stuff, collateral management, credit limits and all other things clearing stood front...

Who would have guessed that Black Friday would have turned out to be a big day for SEF trading. Both Javelin and Tradeweb resubmit their MAT filings, both scaling back the number of products made available for trading. This is a big deal for a few...

In the past I’ve spoken about buy side incentives for using an agency model – chief among them the reluctance or inability to navigate the slew of legal documents an institutional investor would need to sign in order to gain access to the needed...

The CFTC issued a slew of new guidance and rules last week, two of them particularly interesting and impactful. First was the rule that requires clearinghouses to have credit facilities available to back up all margin posted in US Treasuries. I (and...

Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious for some of you, but I’ve had this conversation more than once and felt some clarity was in order here. As we work through the made available to trade (MAT) process, it’s important to reemphasize what actually...

Last week was a busy week in SEF land. November 1 brought in to play a host of new rules, the MAT wars heat up and the Commission made the void rule even more confusing than it was car-flying-off-cliffbefore. So where has that left us? With a huge...