News and Views from FIA Boca 2016
reprinted from TABB Forum>
The futures industry’s FIA Boca conference began 41 years ago as a good excuse to get out of New York, Chicago, and Washington in March but has since turned into one of the tent-pole derivatives conferences of the year. A series of three reports on the conference were posted on the Maven Wave Partners website and the digested highlights of those reports are below.
Day One: Exchange presentations and the future of clearing
Day one of the conference begins slowly with the bulk of the day devoted to presentations from individual exchanges. In one sentence, here’s the essence of the presentations:
- ROFEX: an up-and-coming, keep-an-eye-on-them exchange from Argentina that is 107 years old
- CBOE: the little exchange that can (and does) with new options products and innovative customer outreach
- Eurex: The pending merger between LSE and Eurex parent Deutsche Borse kept them on a short leash but they are making a strong, global push for FX
- ICE: Rarely fails to disappoint and didn’t here with details on comprehensive product integration and their far reaching efforts in data.
- CME: Emphasized their industry best sweep of products with a special shout out for the Ultra Ten Year, the most successful product launch in the history of futures trading
The final session of the day was a panel on The Future of the Industry. The session was moderated by CFTC Commissioner Chris Giancarlo and key comments from panelists included:
- “Now is the time to resize, rescale, and rethink how trades are processed” - Kim Taylor, CME Group
- “Fintech is not a case of disruptive technology but rather efficient technology” - Ray Kahn, Barclays
- “Fat and happy banks are a thing of the past” - David Rutter, R3
- “My developers eyes roll back in their heads when I tell them the multiple and unrelated ways that we have to report trades because regulators don’t coordinate” - Rob Lazarus, Bunge
- “We are open and transparent and because of that good things happen when we interact with regulators” - Doug Cifu, Vitru
Day 2 - Exhange Leaders and Blockchain
A popular feature at both FIA Expo in Chicago and FIA Boca is the exchange leaders panel. FIA Chairman Walt Lukken moderated as senior exchange officials Phupinder Gill from the CME, Charles Li of the Hong Kong Exchanges, Loh Boon Chye from Singapore Exchange, Eurex’s Andreas Preuss, and Jeff Sprecher from ICE once again engaged in their playful and pithy back and forth. The driest moment came when Preuss read a lengthy and detailed statement regarding the just announced merger of Eurex parent Deutsche Borse and LSE from a Moleskine notebook. When he was finished, Lukken voiced the thought of many when he said: “I thought you were going to read that whole notebook!”
Gill was on message as he referred to the new Ultra 10 Year contract, which has quietly become the most successful futures product launch in industry history, and in elucidating the CME strategy of acquisition at home and cooperation abroad. Sprecher was good as usual and even spent a little more time than usual in waving the flag of success at ICE, including their new world cotton contract. Loh was the newcomer on the panel and had the fewest questions and shortest answers. He did say that he sees FX as a key category to target for future development. Finally, Li did an excellent job of describing the patience and long time horizon that Hong Kong is practicing when it comes to developing business in China. Specifically, they are targeting commodities by developing a basis of trust for benchmarks and later they will either develop markets within China, work with other entities to launch the products there, or take the products to Hong Kong for listing. In short, they have options and are taking the long view to achieving success. The Hong Kong Exchange will undoubtedly succeed and be one of the preeminent global exchanges for a long time to come.
It’s a financial conference in 2016 so where’s the blockchain?
An early leader in the competition to be the story of the year for 2016 is blockchain and it was little more than a mention at Boca until the One-On-One Interview featuring Rob Creamer from Geneva Trading talking with Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com. When asked “why blockchain?” he gave three reasons relating to securities markets:
- Cost. He estimates that they can reduce transaction costs in equities trading by 80% to 90%.
- Adoption of blockchain will include the creation of a consolidated audit trail, a stretch goal that the SEC has found to be elusive
- The last bit of “slop” or “mischief” will be removed from the settlement process.
Byrne had much more to say on blockchain, both during this interview and also on the technology panel on day 3.
Getaway Day: Hong Kong and Reg AT
The final day of the conference had more substance than is usually seen on a getaway day with a one-on-one with Hong Kong Exchanges chief Charles Li and a panel on CFTC Reg AT as highlights.
Charles Li may well have the best exchange CEO position in the world. He is positioned in Hong Kong, the gateway to China, and he has the ability to take the long view and work patiently to develop his markets in what everyone knows will be a leading financial center for the next 25 years, at the very least. n his one-on-one interview with Paul Davies of Goldman Sachs, Li repeated the Hong Kong Exchange strategy of developing commodity benchmarks for China and displayed his ability to assess the shortcomings of China in a way that is honest, without being overly critical.
Six Against One Isn’t a Fair Fight
Sebastian Pujol-Schott of the CFTC deserves a lot of props for appearing on the panel “CFTC Reg AT: Will It Improve the Status Quo” because it was clearly him against everyone else on this one. While panel moderator Gary DeWaal of Katten Muchin Rosenman and panelists Jim Moran from the CME Group, William Sprenkeler of Optiver, ICE’s Kurt Windeler, Greg Wood from Deutsche Bank and Chris Zuehlke of DRW were polite and civil in their comments, they clearly have many, many disagreements with both the spirit and specifics with the CFTC. Reg AT is a broad and deep set of rules that are intended to monitor and regulate automated trading (AT) in futures markets and the reported number of comment letters (52) and length of some of those letters (104 pages from the CME and 112 pages from the FIA PTG Professional Traders Group>) illustrate the sheer weight of issues that have to be resolved here.
For Further Reading
To read reports on all of the panels and speakers for the three day FIA Boca conference, please visit the News and Views - Financial Services page on the Maven Wave website. Among other topics, you can read more on blockchain, hear from other exchange leaders, pick up on some juicy comments from speakers John Boehner and Condoleezza Rice, and learn about my patent pending invention, the Trumpinator.