Market FinReg reply to ESMA RTS 1, MiFID II
ESMA proposes to make amendments to RTS 1 of MiFID II related to extending the Tick Size Regime to Systematic Internalisers. This is to prevent a race to the bottom where firms offer meaningless fractional price improvement by offering ever-smaller tick sizes. For reasons which we detail in the enclosed document, we agree with ESMA’s […]
Non-equity CTP: Missed Opportunity
Non-equity CTP proposals: Our View Last Friday (31 March 2017), ESMA released its long-awaited report (“The Final Report”) into the scope of financial instruments and trading venues that are to be included in the non-equity consolidated tape. Background In order to mitigate against the last decade’s market fragmentation, article 65 of the MiFID II Directive […]
Best Execution – A MiFID II Primer
Best Execution So, the FCA outline their findings vis-à-vis Best Execution and people are complaining. In a thoughtful piece, Daryn Kutner complained of a lack of clarity on what constitutes Best Execution: ‘Despite all the best intent that presently exists within the industry to fulfil its Best Execution obligations a universal understanding as to what […]
FCA MiFID II HFT Authorisation
FCA MiFID II HFT Authorisation As MiFID II go-live is less than a year away, the FCA’s attention is shifting to authorisation issues. Today, the FCA held a presentation on the HFT authorisation process. This was intended to augment their recent ‘MiFID II – application and notification user guide’. Their slides contained no surprises but […]
MiFID II: Showtime
MiFID II: Showtime With Christmas 2016 now a distant memory, attention returns to MiFID II. 2017 is the year of implementation! In this short post we consolidate some of the key dates. We have previously mentioned them in our MiFID II: A Survival Guide book but clients felt it would be beneficial to state them […]
The Teething Trading Obligation
The Teething Trading Obligation Back in September 2016 we summarised[1] in our introduction to the issue of the trading obligation: MIFIR obligates classes of derivatives (to be decided by ESMA) to be subjected to the trading obligation (TO). These classes of derivatives must be traded on trading venues and cleared by CCPs. There is considerable […]
Why the need for MiFID II?
Why the need for MiFID II? The existing regulatory landscape has been shaped by various overlapping pieces of legislation. Principle amongst these are Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 on OTC derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories (EMIR) and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2004/39/EC (MiFID I). EMIR, with its overarching objective of reducing systemic risk, lay […]