Wall Street’s pandemic-era trading boom could be drawing to a close, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer Jamie Dimon signalling a 38 per cent decline in trading revenue from a year ago – a bigger drop than previously expected.

“Over the last few years, the dominant narrative has been that more transparency is a good thing, hence the focus on getting more execution on venues,” said Tom Jacques, senior research manager at Coalition Greenwich. “This is largely true, but while transparency has increased, so have the fees earned by the intermediaries and the overall costs incurred by liquidity providers, which ultimately negatively impacts the end investor.” 

The Federal Reserve will begin to unwind the corporate bond holdings it acquired last year through an emergency lending facility launched to calm credit markets at the height of the pandemic, the central bank announced on Wednesday.

Therein lies the conundrum. If the Fed tightens, the existing debt pile becomes more expensive to service, hampering economic growth. If the Fed doesn’t tighten, debt across households, companies and the government continues to grow, making it ever tougher for the Fed to move.

Amazon set a record in the corporate bond market on Monday, getting closer to the level of interest paid by the US government than any US company has previously managed in a fundraising.

And while tech developments have remedied syndicate’s more menial administrative tasks, like manually entering every investor order into a spreadsheet multiple times a day, the enhancements irk some bankers who fear they could one day become unneeded.

The EU’s executive arm said Wednesday that traders at the banks worked together on trading strategies, exchanged sensitive price information and coordinated prices for sovereign bonds denominated in dollars.

“The cartel harmed the financial markets,” said Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the European Commission. She said the trading restricted competition when fund managers bought and sold bonds on behalf of investors and retirees. 

In an effort to refine Stifel’s distribution strategy, we recently solicited feedback from customers about their electronic preferences for delivery of our liquidity pool (pre-trade data) and how they are interacting with the street in an increasingly digital-based financial landscape.

Our outreach included inquiries about customers’ order and execution management systems (OMS and EMS) and connectivity preferences. In all, we gathered more than 500 responses from institutions of all sizes and sophistication levels in Investment Grade, High Yield and Emerging Markets.

Senators voted 53-45 to approve Mr. Gensler’s nomination, making him the most prominent financial regulator that President Biden has hired to date. He received support from three Republicans, reflecting the GOP’s limited appetite for a policy agenda that is expected to include requiring more disclosure from public companies on matters such as the potential impact of climate change on their businesses.

While big-dealer dominance used to come from their large balance sheets, which allowed them to take principal risk, their dominance now is based much more on the network of clients they’ve created over time, and their ability to connect opposing interests among them. In other words, they know where the bonds are buried.