Adrian Biesty, Head of Trading,
Lombard Odier Investment Management

• Which focus area would you like to see progressed by the end of 2022?

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There are a couple of themes at play here:

 

- Data integration to trading systems  – Although we have had a pretty great start on this front a few years ago when we developed  our in house bespoke liquidity analysis tools there are always areas which we can dive into in more detail. Doing deep dives into the trading data we have helps unlock incremental improvements in overall execution performance. We’ve seen that across multiple asset classes as they have evolved  and as data granularity gets better in various market segments like EM, CB’s certain part of credit market it all adds up to a much better outcome for our clients and fund performance.

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- Automation – We have been very early adopters of Automation across our whole asset suite, in some asset classes this has matured with the rate of change dissipating in recent years particularly in listed products. There still remains scope for further automation in products like FX, some credit, EM.

Traders can add more value in a handful of large complex trades than they can in 100 vanilla ones which in turn makes the job interesting. We will always want to be a more efficient trading desk but that has to free up time for traders to deliver alpha by optimising  execution costs.

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   • Which is the biggest market structure issue in your opinion?

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We continue to observe how CSDR is going to pan out for our industry. If it comes in to effect in February 2022, its likely effect will be to increase trading costs to end investors. This happens in two ways 1) Liquidity at individual security level. Bid/ask spreads will widen, less participants market making particular product, II) Concentration risk in only active names, once bonds fall off the run  liquidity premium to trade them increases, meaning that companies with large tradeable Cap structures may benefit disproportionately as investors will tend to crowd these actively traded names.

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• Which focus area would you like to see progressed by the end of 2022?

 

- ​A Consolidated tape for fixed income products.

- ​Standardisation of Primary market DCM Flows hopefully we get close to having a one stop shop for all our global DCM business, it’s not quite there at the moment but getting close. 

- Future clarity on CSDR would help the industry as a whole and help buy and sell side prepare their portfolios for the liquidity landscape in coming year.

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• How has your firm adapted to working post lockdown?

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Honestly we were very well prepared pre pandemic as all our traders had a setup at home which were tested regularly, the pandemic just meant we had to be more pragmatic in keeping contact points up with the trading and wider PM teams, that can be taken for granted in the office as really there Is so much information consumed in a passive way every day in the office it’s important to stay connected with each other

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• Top positive tips for your peers and colleagues in trading? Power of #buysidepositivity

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- Make sure you have side interests and stick with them, don’t let the job define you as a person, it will bring better balance to your life.

- Enjoy the industry we’re in – personally,  I feel privileged to work with smart, talented, charismatic colleagues, in a position where no two days are the same. Where different markets are evolving at pace. There’s always something going on in some region or asset class, which brings huge variety in the job.!