Crypto currencies have been making headlines again over the last couple of weeks thanks to Chinese regulators banning financial institutions and payment companies from providing cryptocurrency transaction services, while also warning investors against speculative crypto trading. Sentiment was further undermined by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, reversing a previous decision that his company would accept Bitcoin […]
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I was lucky enough to join Nomura’s Japanese equity desk in London as my first job out of university. It was the late 80s, the Nikkei 225 was soon to hit an all-time high of nearly 39,000, and the big 4 Japanese brokerages of Nomura, Yamaichi, Daiwa and Nikko had become international financial powerhouses. However, […]
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Discussing the state of capital markets tech In the unusual world we find ourselves, catching up with industry peers via Zoom or Teams seems to be the only way to compare notes these days. It was great then that Toby Babb pulled a group of us together on Fintech Focus TV for an in-depth […]
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Running trading infrastructure in large sell-side firms is a tough gig. Not only are you responsible for perhaps the most business-critical part of your organisation, but even the smallest outage or change management error is highly visible to your clients. Dropping the ball can have significant economic consequences, not least thanks to an increasingly […]
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According to surfing folklore, the seventh wave is the largest of the set. This is perhaps a fitting metaphor for what’s about to happen in electronic trading. Recapping on the last three decades, we’ve certainly come a long way, and whether or not you agree with my preceding six waves, they are certainly significant milestones. […]
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What does competing order flow mean to you? The economics of providing sell-side execution services have become increasingly challenging since the financial crisis of 2008. High costs and commission compression are driving an unhealthy level of industry consolidation. And while the increasing prevalence of white label business models and improved off-the-shelf technology have helped address […]
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Rapid Addition CEO Mike Powell explores how the traditional barriers to platform modernisation can and need to be broken down as trading platform strategy evolves. Even before the recent Covid-19 crisis, many firms were already assessing their electronic trading platform strategy against the developing needs of their clients and the evolving patterns of liquidity […]
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Best-Execution speaks to Rapid Addition CEO, Mike Powell about market trends and the launch of their new trading technology platform. Posted by: Best Execution , April 27, 2020. Rapid Addition (RA) has been providing electronic trading technology to the market for over a decade, what have been the major trends over that period and what does the current […]
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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Europe’s institutional sell-side firms have had a tough time in recent years. As well as the costly overhead of implementing and complying with MiFID II, the industry continues to grapple with a deteriorating economic outlook (compounded by the Covid-19 outbreak) and shrinking commissions, while structural changes have made equity […]
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Optimizing economies of scale is the way to go – especially when it comes to growing in the foreign exchange space. Rapid Addition specializes in the provision of high-performance enterprise solutions for electronic trading. The firm is a pioneer in FIX/FAST and FPGA technology and offers a messaging platform that combines the benefit of software […]
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