Fixed Income Leaders 2025 Blog

Take a look at the round up of the 10th Anniversary of the Fixed Income Leaders Summit!

In the constantly evolving fixed-income landscape, trading desks across Europe are forced to navigate complexities thrown at them from all directions whilst maintaining precision and success as they traverse dynamic financial markets. Here are some of the key drivers impacting trading desks this year.

Tim Martins at MTS discusses the pressure on both sides of the aisle to create better visibility of repo data between the dealers and the buy side. He also unpacks the need for the sell side to adapt to the higher central bank rates environment and the demand to electronify workflows in repo trading.

Byron Cooper-Fogarty, chief operating officer at Neptune Networks, discusses the growing use of axe data in varying buy-side workflows and its role in accelerating the electronification of fixed-income markets. He looks at the evolving use cases for axe data not only on the execution desk but also for portfolio construction and management.

“What we have seen, particularly during Covid and post-Covid, is that increasingly portfolio managers are using axes to create portfolios to ensure that they create orders for the trading desk where they can actually express their investment views,” Cooper-Fogarty says.

Using high quality market data to assess bond market activity is allowing buy-side trading desks to build the equivalent of an order routing system in fixed income, through the application of machine learning to identify the optimal trading protocol to use.

Gio Accurso, senior research analyst at MarketAxess, explains how the path from better data is creating efficiency on the trading desk for investment managers.

Ben Jefferys, head of sales engineering at Genesis Global, unpacks some of the lead challenges impacting primary bond market workflows and the technical lift required to consolidate and integrate the multiple sources of information. Speaking on the side lines of the Fixed Income Leaders’ Summit in Barcelona, he also discusses the relentless cost pressures on the buy side, the push to create better efficiencies across different asset classes, and the need to bake agility into product designs.

“What the buy-side or anyone needs to be thinking about is: ‘I need to solve a problem for today but I don’t want to create a problem for tomorrow’. So be thoughtful in the design decisions that you are taking.” he says.

Steve Toland, Co-Founder of TransFICC, discusses the changing face of fixed-income and multi-asset trading desks through the development of standardized APIs; bank user interfaces, and trading algorithms for RFQ negotiations. He also unpacks the limitations of some algos in fixed income and says that there is a long way to go before AI is ready for FI trading applications.

“I don’t think AI is ready for prime time yet. Maybe it will be used to analyze data but in terms of trading functionality there is a long way to go,” Toland says.

The costs of liquidity are impacted by capital costs – both short and long term – along with market microstructural changes. Increasingly, trading protocols and automation are enabling trading desks to manage these costs, but crucially relationships between counterparties are still key.

Kate Finlayson, Global Head of FICC Market Structure and Liquidity Strategy at JP Morgan, talks through the key regulatory, technology and innovative changes that are changing the way firms are executing in the market, and which routes or instruments they are choosing to use.

At Fixed Income Leaders 2023, experts discussed the likelihood of a recession, Europe's mild recession prospects, US stability, and China's economic challenges.

At Fixed Income Leaders 2023, panelists from Ninety One, ICE and BlackRock discussed the challenges of data ownership

In 2022, bond markets have been navigated more easily thanks to innovative new trading protocols. By allowing traders to control information disclosure, and negotiate size/price more effectively with counterparties, both sides can find the right level of comfort at which a trade can take place.

Trading desks have seen their technology skills and data literacy expand. They can act more independently as a result, through a tailored approach to working with new solutions. As a result they are developing and integrating services into their trading workflow in partnership with suppliers.

Faced with a highly manual model for sharing information when buying newly issued bonds, asset managers and syndicate banks are keen to see a more automated and efficient workflow.

In volatile markets, real time delivery and updates of axe information proved invaluable to supporting trade execution for both the buy-side and the sell side. Now Neptune Networks, the axe-delivery specialist, wants to do more.

Take a look back at this TradeTv interview from FILS 2021. How you can trade on LedgerEdge from launch.

Take a look back at this Trader TV interview from The Fixed Income Leaders summit as AxeTrading and ICE provide data to traders on desktop and integrated within workflow

Take a look back at this TraderTv interview from FILS 2021 -Neptune Networks outlines drivers for growth across buy- and sell-side firms

Take a look back at this TraderTv interview from FILS 2021 -Bloomberg's latest pre-trade analytics provide a gateway to trade automation

Aite-Novarica brings you their Fixed Income Leaders Summit Europe 2021 wrap up. Aite-Novarica Group analysts report the top themes discussed at FILS and their implications for investors. Among a litany of topics, including growth of portfolio trading, the adoption of execution management systems (EMSs), and ongoing market volatility, the potential for sustainable investing and all things related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) to further shape the fixed income market emerged as dominant concepts.

Exclusively for attendees of this year's Fixed Income Leaders Summit, we present an excerpt from our top FI picks for the rest of this year – an update to our top picks for 2021, published in December. Our revised Top 5 comprises Buys on hard currency bonds in Angola, Ecuador and Rwanda, and local debt in Egypt and Zambia. Three of these are new additions (Ecuador, Rwanda, Zambia), while two picks (Angola and Egypt) are unchanged from our top picks for the year. We have removed Ethiopia, Mozambique and Sri Lanka.

Last week, we held a series of client meetings in London, our first since Covid began eighteen months ago, meeting with a mix of fixed income and equity investors in EM and Frontiers, Africa specialists, and special situations and distress funds. For some of the investors we met, it was their first meeting since the pandemic began too. We summarise some of the key discussion points here.

Now the shockwaves sent through global industry by the COVID-19 crisis have begun to subside somewhat and people are attempting to return to some semblance of their regular pre-pandemic existences, it’s a good point in time to assess where we are as an industry, and what we see as the “new normal”...

Reflecting on the evolution of the fixed income landscape and how it has adapted and reinvented itself through the last decade

2019 vs. 2020: How have fixed income desks adapted and evolved along the innovation journey to survive a global crisis and thrive in the future marketplace?

Generating alpha in an era of instability: How can you diversify your portfolio and achieve optimal trading efficiency to thrive in an era of constant market disruption?

The next big shift: How is the Fixed Income market structure and trading ecosystem evolving, and how will it look like in 2021 and beyond?

How can you adjust overall trading desk set-up to implement a successful Covid-19 recovery roadmap, and how will this change your investment and trading strategies moving forward?

The use of fixed income exchange-traded funds for long term investment as well as for shorter term liquidity management and portfolio transitions. Tom Stephens, head of international ETF Capital Markets at JP Morgan Asset Management, says that changes in the regulation has increased transparency, changes in market participants has increased liquidity and changes in market structure has increased price formation, all of which has improved institutional access. The next step for the market will be the development of active ETFs and evolving smart beta ETFs that give better exposure to the right returns and risks.

Jim Goldie, head of ETF Capital Markets (EMEA) at Invesco, discusses his views on the growth in the use of fixed income ETFs, how they can have tighter spreads than the index and provide cost efficient execution, with Hamish McArthur of ETF TV.

Highlights from the discussions at the Fixed Income Leaders Summit in Barcelona, 2019.

An increased reliance on the primary market is impacting trading desks’ efficiency in secondary trading. Frustration with the issue is leading asset managers to look for a reform of existing processes. Oscar Kenessey, head of fixed income, derivatives and currency trading at NNIP, and Eric Heleine, head of the trading desk at Groupama Asset Management, make the case for several lines of reform.

Les gestionnaires d’actifs doivent aujourd’hui surmonter l’inefficacité opérationnelle sur les marchés primaires; nous avons discuté avec Doriane Geyler-Rojas et Abdoulaye Ba de Natixis Asset Management Finance pour savoir comment ils essaient de surmonter ces obstacles.

Asset managers need to overcome operational inefficiency in primary markets today; we spoke with Doriane Geyler-Rojas and Abdoulaye Ba of Natixis Asset Management Finance to learn how they are trying to overcome these hurdles, through a better use of data, access to platforms and potentially through regulatory change.

When over-the-counter markets are suffering from a limited liquidity supply, buy-side firms can struggle with price formation and counterparty selection; Lee Bartholomew, head of derivatives product R&D in fixed income at Eurex, outlines the strategies and skills that traders should consider when assessing instrument selection.

By bringing together the dealer-to-dealer and dealer-to-client repo markets, asset managers can gain real advantages from trade clearing to straight-through-processing; Oliver Clark, head of product and Tim Martins, head of product for repo and money markets at MTS discuss.