The FCA’s consultation questioned whether SI quotes should be used to determine the best bid offer (BBO) alongside venue quotes, or whether all quotes provided from SIs should be published and/or a BBO from public SI quotes as a separate figure to the trading venue-derived BBO.

Continue Reading…

The FIX Trading Community has called for changes to UK financial regulation in response to consultations from the Financial Conduct Authority, focusing on post-trade transparency and transaction reporting requirements.

Continue Reading…

The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the world’s trading language, the FIX Protocol, has called for changes to UK financial regulation as part of its responses to FCA consultations on the UK consolidated tape (CP25/31), and transaction reporting (CP25/32).

Continue Reading…

The FIX Trading Community has called for significant changes to UK financial regulation in its formal response to FCA consultations on the UK consolidated tape and transaction reporting. Executive Director Jim Kaye emphasised that harmonising UK reporting rules more closely with EU standards would reduce complexity, lower the reporting burden, and improve the quality of market data. By addressing current concerns with post-trade transparency, the association aims to boost investor confidence in UK-based liquidity.

Continue Reading…

Where the Global Trading Community Meets at the Edge of Change

Each year, as markets continue to evolve in subtle but consequential ways, the Asia Pacific Trading Summit in Hong Kong marks a moment for the industry to pause, reconnect and look ahead.

Continue Reading…

Speaking at the Singapore FIX Trading Community conference, FIX Southeast Asia Multi-Asset Trading Conference 2025, Winnie Khattar, APAC Head of Market Development, BlackRock and Larry Tabb, Director: Market Structure Research, Bloomberg, LLP looked back over the year in US and APAC markets, and considered how markets might evolve in response to the many changes happening at once.

APAC markets experienced unprecedented volumes and index levels this year, with markets such as Korea and Japan reaching new highs. Japan noted all-time record turnover in October, average $50B a day in the equities market. Investors hunting liquidity were actively trading at the close of day, making use of liquidity aggregation in the closing auctions with lower price impact, making this mechanism more relevant than ever before.

Volatility too tested previous limits and is likely to remain high over the short term, as geopolitical news and US-driven macro sentiment continues to roil markets, said Ms Khattar. “The good news is that market turbulence has tested the resilience of platforms and systems across exchanges and the street,” she said.

ETFs continued to grow as a proportion of most APAC markets, with volumes up on both primary and secondary markets. On high volatility days, ETFs accounted for over 50% of total trading activity on tape in the US. In Asia, Japan-listed ETFs traded 2.6x average volume on secondary markets this year. We continue to see strong retail participation in APAC markets, with growing demand for innovative exposures such as global active and crypto based ETFs.

24/5 trading has been much talked about this year but remains a retail play for now. Lack of regulation and little interest from institutional investors is likely to see this remain the case for some time. “To ensure market integrity and investor confidence in extended trading hours, robust frameworks are essential – covering regulation, risk controls, transparent reporting, and liquidity mechanisms that uphold market quality,” Ms Khattar said.

Retail engagement in APAC is highly diverse, shaped by local market structures and regulatory frameworks. Ms Khattar pointed to Japan as having adopted a deliberate, long-term strategy to deepen retail participation in capital markets, prioritising investors over short-term trading. Through initiatives like NISA, a tax incentive scheme, the government has encouraged households to shift cash from savings into diversified investment solutions. “These programs are designed to deliver outcomes retail investors value – balanced exposure to regional and global market within well-structured funds – supporting wealth creation and financial resilience,” she said.

Balancing the retail market’s appetite for risk with the need to protect ‘mom and pop’ investors is a core theme in the US this year, as prediction markets have sprung up almost out of nowhere, said Mr Tabb. “Investing has always been separate to gambling, but this past year the wall has come tumbling down,” he said. “Prediction markets are bringing gambling to folks’ retirement accounts – do we really want to give the punter betting on football games 10x leverage on SPX? I don’t think that’s a good thing.” The panel agreed that while regulators in APAC are yet to tackle prediction markets, they are likely to take a relatively conservative approach.

Fixed income markets also matured this year with the electronification of India’s government bond market, and progress on enhanced transparency to be delivered through the consolidated tape in Europe. These developments will boost efficiency and scalability of markets, in turn improving liquidity and reducing impact costs. India’s move to digitise access to government bonds marks a transformative step, vastly improving access to India’s onshore bond market. Indian and Korean government bond inclusion into benchmark indices further supported volume growth, and this momentum will continue to build with further indexation of these markets.

Tokenised bonds, which have been issued by Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong, have attracted interest and proven the model can work, but secondary markets are still traded by voice due to lack of liquidity. “Our current financial markets are functioning on decades old infrastructure, with incremental upgrades over the years. Money transfer still takes a long time to get to where it needs to be due to legacy infrastructure, time zone, cut-off times, reconciliation processes and more,” Ms Khattar said. “Tokenisation can address many of these challenges by enabling instant delivery and payment when transacting tokenised bonds, funds, and stablecoins. This allows money and assets to move quickly and smoothly, improving operational efficiency and giving investors immediate access to their investments. However, achieving this outcome will require significant investment in infrastructure and technology.”

While tokenisation of bonds makes sense, wholesale tokenisation of capital markets workflows is unlikely to be coming any time soon, Mr Tabb said. “For equities for example we have market makers trading back and forth every microsecond – do you really want to be moving money back and forth as well? How do I go short? Do I really want to be moving cash all around the place intraday? The mechanics just don’t work right now,” he said. “Add to that the absolutely massive risk of moving several trillion of AUM into a new back office – if that goes wrong at one of the big asset managers it’s a black swan event. Is gaining a day or two in the trade cycle worth the risk?”

The use of tokenised funds for collateral was an opportunity that would likely be worth the investment for APAC specifically, said Ms Khattar. “Tokenised collateral solutions have the potential to transform capital markets in Asia by enabling near-instant settlement of USD cash and other assets,” she said. “Unlike the US and Europe, where USD cash collateral settles on a T+0 basis, APAC markets due to time zone difference have a one-day lag to settle USD cash on T+1, resulting in an extra day of exposure and funding costs. Tokenised collateral solutions can alleviate this one day of funding costs, significantly lowering cost of collateral for the industry.”

The move toward tokenisation in APAC is likely to be cautious, with each regulator and market taking individual approaches and balancing investor protection needs with market freedom and innovation. “I think we’ll see tokenisation occurring alongside tradfi for decades yet – building new systems off to the side and seeing how they go,” Mr Tabb said. “There won’t be a landmark shift where everything is tokenised.”

Up until November 2020, FIX 5.0 Service Pack 2 remained the latest version of FIX Protocol. It was the last of traditional, numbered versions identified in the FIX field ApplVerID(1128) – a field added as follows in FIX 5.0.

Extension Packs (a.k.a. EPs) were introduced after the release of FIX 4.4 as a means to identify each gap analysis proposal that contributed to the enhancements of FIX. In EP260 “FIXLatest” was added as an official “version” label and successor to FIX 5.0 Service Pack 2 (see here for details).

FIX 5.0 Service Pack 2 has now been moved to the list of unsupported versions of the FIX Protocol (see here). This does not mean that implementations can no longer use ApplVerID(1128) = 9 (FIX50SP2); implementations can also still use any of the other unsupported versions. It means that FIX will not analyse reported errors or correct any errors in unsupported versions.

Versions FIX 4.2 and FIX 4.4 are supported versions and have been migrated to the Orchestra Standard v1.0. The repositories for these two versions are available in GitHub where they are maintained and can be visualized with the free tool Orchimate, which was developed and is maintained by a FIX member firm. The FIX 4.2 and FIX 4.4 specification documents define the functional scope of these versions and are not subject to change.

The version FIX Latest is enhanced with every FIX Extension Pack. When an EP is released, the published repository artefacts always include functionality from all previous EPs, i.e. each EP release is cumulative. Therefore it is not necessary to download prior EPs of FIX Latest. Correction of issues found in previous EPs are only made to the latest EP and documented on the download page.

It should be noted that that the value of BeginString(8) does not identify the FIX Protocol version but the FIX Session Layer protocol, a change made as part of FIX 5.0. Prior to FIX 5.0 the value was identical to the FIX Protocol version, e.g. “FIX.4.4”. With the release of FIX 5.0, the BeginString(8) value was changed to “FIXT.1.1” and has not changed since.

Hanno Klein
FIX Technical Director

Industry discussions over recent years have frequently mourned the decline of the lit market and the lack of addressable liquidity in Europe and the UK. Yet panellists at the FIX EMEA Trading Conferences in London last week were optimistic about the state of the markets, and suggested that the issue is really a semantic one.

Continue Reading…

AI has been, is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, one of the hottest topics in trading, with large language models (LLMs) the latest iteration to make headline news.

… read more