On February 15th, the SEC blocked the sale of the Chicago Stock Exchange (CHX) to a China-based consortium, due to concerns over the proposed ownership structure. This is the latest blow to the storied exchange, which was founded in 1882 but has...

I've been working on Wall Street for almost 20 years now, the last 10 as an industry analyst. In hindsight, it’s amazing to think how much has changed in the last decade, and conversely, how much has stayed the same. Putting aside the...

With MiFID II’s implementation date less than three months away, the real cost of research under the new regime is looming large. According to Greenwich Associates research based on interviews with 164 equity traders and 198 equity-focused portfolio...

Investors continue to thirst for market structure information.  In our most recent U.S. equities study, almost half of buy-side respondents told us that sell-side provision of market-structure-related services was either important or very...

While market sizes are often measured in the trillions of dollars, the number of firms that are responsible for the majority of transactions is measured in the hundreds if not the teens.  Examples of this are numerous.  According to...

There is a tremendous amount of irony in the path high-frequency trading - excuse me, principal trading firms have taken from their heyday in the late 2000's.  We alluded to this a few months ago in our Top Market Structure Trends to Watch...

You can't really blame Deutsche Bank for getting out of the swaps clearing business .  It has been 7 years since Dodd-Frank was passed, and four years since clearing mandates took effect in the US, and clearing swaps for customers still falls...

The years since the financial crisis have brought with them amazing amounts of change, innovation, disruption and more recently optimism. At Greenwich Associates we're lucky enough to have a client list that includes some of the smartest and...

The market is more electronic than ever, but relationships still drive the vast majority of trading.  It is important to remember that “electronic trading” and “relationships” are not mutually exclusive, and that even the most electronic firms...

The majority of startups fail.  A little googling told me that over 90% fail within three years.  Despite the fact that the cost of starting a company has decreased considerably via cloud computing and open source technology, taking into...