This week on The Spread, FIA’s virtual expo fills in for the physical event, Cboe and ICE launch new products, and more.

Andy Tan is a former floor broker on SIMEX for Merrill Lynch. He was in the SIMEX trading pits with Merrill Lynch for almost 15 years.

The John Lothian Daily Update is a podcast turning the daily JLN hits and takes comments, our original content and the stories and quips in the top box of First Read into a daily podcast.

Although it was a period of heightened volatility, 2020 was a big year for retail investors, who jumped in as many institutional investors moved to the sidelines. Finally, over the last week and a half, those institutions are coming back in, said Ed Tilly, chairman,...

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial industry has largely shifted to working from home this year. On day two of FIA Expo-V, executives from major institutions throughout the financial industry shared what they had learned from shifting to remote and...

As the deadline for the end of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) looms at the end of 2021, a host of legacy issues and alternative rate choices remain on the table, members of an FIA Expo panel on short-term interest rate rates agreed. But while the panelists...

Allison Lurton, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for FIA, was joined by two lawyers from the law firm Faegre Drinker, James Ludy and Nicholas Wendland, on Thursday morning at FIA Expo for the inevitable panel on spoofing. This one came with a refreshing twist -...

The world of blockchain and digital assets is one of tech enthusiasts. Consequently, understanding it requires significant technical knowledge, so it can be difficult to understand how a digital asset protocol works, let alone a broader technological movement like...

Mini and micro futures contracts at various exchanges have been gaining a lot of traction lately, presumably because of the "Robinhood effect" of retail traders coming into the markets. Our own John Lothian led a panel at FIA Expo-V Thursday titled "How Small Can You...

Deborah North, partner at the law firm Allen & Overy, moderated the Wednesday morning panel titled “Is Market Fragmentation the Future?” at FIA Expo 2020.

Wednesday morning Kevin McPartland, head of research at Greenwich Associates, and his U.S. Treasury Market: Key Takeaways From March 2020 panelists dug into what happened in the market during that remarkable month. The Managed Funds Association’s Ben Allensworth said...

Far from being felled by the COVID pandemic – or anything else that has happened in 2020 – the Intercontinental Exchange had its best year in history in revenue and earnings and made its largest acquisition deal ever – which is saying a lot – by buying Ellie Mae two months ago.

Correction: TradeX does not hold customer data. The Innovator’s Pavillion is one of the most intriguing parts of FIA Expo - a small, curated collection of starry-eyed startups aspiring to make their mark. On the first day of FIA’s virtual Expo-V conference, each of...

Industry buzz about exchange-traded environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) products has grown, but getting traction on ESG derivatives can be challenging, a panel of industry specialists said. Speaking in a Eurex-sponsored FIA Expo-V session on the...

Making his debut performance at an FIA conference Wednesday, Eurex CEO Michael Peters argued in favor of the drive toward environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) products and weighed the pros and cons of the European Commission’s equivalence decision for...

Jim Kharouf, communications director of IncubEx Inc., began “Innovation on the Edges” on Day 2 of FIA-V by saying “Happy Birthday” to the exchanges of each panelist present on the call he was moderating. The Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) is celebrating its twentieth year...

Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said Tuesday that while the story of 2020 has been one of uncertainty, beginning in March with the pandemic and continuing with the U.S. presidential elections, she was proud of the way the exchange industry has risen to the challenge....

A Tuesday morning panel called “Clearing During Volatility” gathered Sarah Shore (Goldman Sachs), Lee Betsill (CME), Dale Michaels (OCC), Gert Ellerkmann (ABN AMRO Clearing Bank), and Jackie Mesa (FIA). The session focused on the February - March 2020 kind of...

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce reiterated her often-expressed free market stance toward the cryptocurrency markets Tuesday, saying the industry has been developing at a dramatic pace and the regulatory pace has not kept up. As a consequence, the industry is fraught...

In “the most uncertain times in the world,” CME Group CEO Terry Duffy does not appear to be fazed by the potential threat of a short selling ban or a financial transaction tax, nor by the volume drop in the CME’s interest rate complex this year.

Climate change and its attendant issues are often characterized by contentious debate. That was not the case at the FIA Expo seminar, Managing the Risk of Climate Change: The Role of Markets, moderated by Athena Eastwood (Partner, Willkie, Farr & Gallagher).

In what is likely to be his last FIA Expo address as chairman of the CFTC, Dr. Heath Tarbert spoke for about half an hour on Tuesday morning at this year’s conference which, of course, is being Zoomed around the world.

This week on The Spread – record-high options trading volumes, new products from Intercontinental Exchange and HKEX, and more.