Arianne Collette, head of US equities, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has appointed Arianne Collette as a managing director and head of US equities as it continues to build its presence in the asset class.
In the newly-created role, Colette is responsible for strategic planning and execution, market expansion and growth of the business’ clearing and settlement infrastructure. Based in Jersey City, she reports to managing director and global head of equities solutions Val Wotton.
Earlier this year, DTCC announced that 24/5 clearing of US equities would be available through the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) from Q2 2026 as the journey to 24-hour trading accelerates.
Collette joins DTCC after 24 years with major liquidity provider Morgan Stanley, where she has held senior roles including chief operating officer and head of strategy for reinvestment in the business’ wealth management division, global head of sales strategy, and Americas head of firm-secured funding. Earlier in her career, Colette was a sec lending and collateral finance sales trader, and a fixed income repo trader.
Wotton commented, “[Collette’s] deep industry expertise, strategic vision, and commitment to innovation will be invaluable as we continue to deliver solutions that enhance market resiliency and efficiency for our clients.”
ESMA’s move from the double to single volume cap was promoted as an easing in regulation. But systematic internalisers say the move will result in dark volume moving to periodic auctions, harder to tailor liquidity provision in bilateral relationships, and an equally opaque post-trade liquidity picture.
ESMA’s latest equity-market transparency package is now in its implementation phase. It brings two interconnected changes to European equities trading: the double volume cap has been retired for a single EU-wide volume cap on dark trading and increases pre-trade quoting obligations for the new “opt-in” systematic internalisers (SIs) have been upgraded.
Under previous versions of MiFID II, investment firms could be pushed into SI status once their dealing activity passed ESMA’s quantitative thresholds. Under the revised framework, firms can now choose to declare themselves an SI for a given instrument or class. Optiver did so in March 2025.
When it proposed the new pre- and post-trade transparency regime, ESMA said: “[The package] aims to contribute to a more informative pre-trade and post-trade transparency regime.”
While the move to a single volume cap reduces reporting burden and makes it easier for dark trading caps to be put in place directly by venues, in the UK, the FCA has removed the volume cap altogether. The FCA has not moved like ESMA in upgrading the standard market size requirements in pre trade transparency.
The new single-volume cap pushes dark volume to periodic auctions
The main change for venues and brokers is the replacement of the double volume cap with a single cap for trading under the price waiver, allowing stocks to trade in dark. Instead of checking both a per-venue 4% limit and an EU-wide 8% limit on trading under the reference-price waiver, ESMA now aggregates all European trading volume from every venue to determine if more than 7% of stocks have traded in dark. Once an instrument breaches that level, use of the waiver is suspended across the Union for 3 months.
Several electronic liquidity providers have pointed out to us that this dark volume moves straight into periodic auctions. One SI active in streaming to the buyside put it bluntly: “You’re not shrinking dark demand; you’re just relocating it to something ESMA hasn’t capped.”
This can already be seen in the data since the new single-volume cap list got posted on 10 October. Since the new cap was introduced, the proportion of addressable liquidity traded in periodic auctions, according to BMLL Vantage, has risen by a third from 6.3% to 8.1%. Mirroring this change, dark volumes have fallen from roughly 8% to 6%
Adressable liquidity pre and post new SVC
New pre-trade transparency requirements impact ELPs’ ability to tailor the size of their streamed quotes
The most operationally burdensome piece is the new pre-trade transparency requirement for SIs.
ESMA’s stated goal was to enhance pre-trade transparency for systematic internalisers because it said that:” allowing SIs to quote at 10% of SMS “has led to very low levels of pre-trade transparency.”
ESMA has changed the standard market sizes (SMS) that define how much an SI must be prepared to show on both sides of the market while streaming quotes. In the past, SIs had to bid and offer everyone at least 10% of the SMS and be prepared to fill all orders up to 100% of the SMS at that quote.
They now are forced to stream quotes at the full SMS, on a more granular scale, especially for smaller stocks with SMS sub-€10k. SIs must fill orders at that quote up to 2 times the SMS.
The Sis / ELPs we talked to said it would not be an issue to fulfil these new liquidity conditions, but it might make it harder to tailor the risk-adjusted liquidity profile they want to offer for individual clients.
New transparency requirements don’t bring a clearer liquidity picture
The ELPs we talked to, who wished to remain anonymous, said that while all these changes were costly in terms of constant compliance changes, they were ultimately not a threat to their bilateral liquidity provision ability.
They pointed out that, for a transparency package, they did not address the difficulty to understand the actual accessibility picture of European stocks liquidity: A large proportion of what is reported under the SI category is still broker internalisation of agency and swap flows that will continue to be reported off-book on exchange. Coupled with inconsistent flagging as coherent FIX flags are still not mandated by the regulator, prints that do not represent a genuine economic interest will likely continue to be accounted alongside genuine accessible liquidity and will not become more transparent because an SI somewhere else has lifted its SMS.
For liquidity providers that do run genuine bilateral risk, the new rules “make it harder to provide genuine risk” because they lock in a bigger public commitment without distinguishing between principal SIs and banks internalising for clients.
Matthew Evans has left his role as an equity fund manager and senior portfolio manager at Ninety One, after more than eight years with the firm.
He is now a member of the Global Growth Market advisory board, a project aiming to develop an international stock market for growth companies.
Based in London, Global Growth Market intends to give smaller, sub-US$5 billion companies access to public capital and a simplified IPO process. It intends to begin trading next year.
Commenting on his move via LinkedIn, Evans said, “I’ve stepped away from my role at Ninety One to pursue opportunities that allow me to support businesses more directly as they scale and evolve — and to help investors access the next generation of growth.”
He described the Global Growth Market as “designed to make public markets work better for entrepreneurs”.
Evans’ more than 25-year career has included fund manager roles at Threadneedle Investments and Legal & General Investment Management.
Wajih Ahmed has swapped Goldman Sachs for Balyasny Asset Management, joining the firm as a macro portfolio manager after more than a decade with the bank. He is based in London.
Balyasny Asset Management holds US$29 billion in assets under management. Earlier this year, the company appointed Stephen Peyser as global head of trading and capital markets.
Ahmed has almost a decade of industry experience, all of which has been spent at Goldman Sachs. He joined the bank as an inflation trading analyst in 2016, before becoming an associate and then vice president of inflation trading in 2020.
Manuel Esteve has been promoted to global co-head of equity capital markets at UBS. He is based in London.
The announcement follows last week’s promotion of Gareth McCartney, formerly co-head of the ECM business and now global head of capital markets origination. In the US, Steve Studnicky was promoted to co-head of ECM for the Americas earlier this year.
UBS’ capital markets results within its investment banking division were US$328 million in Q2 2025, up 24% year-on-year. In its report, UBS stated, “higher ECM revenues [were] more than offset by lower LCM and 65m of markdowns on LCM and hedging positions.”
Esteve has close to 30 years of experience and has been with UBS as head of EMEA ECM since 2022. Prior to this, he was a managing director at Barclays Investment Bank and JP Morgan.
RBC Capital Markets has made a number of senior hires within its European equities sales trading team, reporting to head of European equity sales trading teams Luke Mackaill.
RBC reported CAD 301 million in equity trading revenues for Q3 2025, up 43% year-on-year. This represents 22% of the company’s overall trading revenue.
Imad Frigui leads continental Europe cash equities sales trading, based in Paris. He joins the firm with more than 15 years of industry experience, most recently servicing as an equity sales trader at Wells Fargo. He has held the same role at BNP Paribas and Bank of America.
In London, Malcolm Pratt has joined the company as a director of EMEA high-touch sales trading. He will specialise in hedge fund and sovereign wealth client coverage.
Pratt joins from Clear Street, where he has been a managing director for execution services since June.
Tracey Brown, who recently joined the firm as an EMEA equity cash sales trader, has also been named director of EMEA high-touch sales trading with a focus on the global and UK institutional client base.
“These appointments highlight our continued investment in growing our presence in the UK and Continental Europe by enhancing our capabilities and continuing to deliver value to our clients,” commented Mackaill.
Johnmark Lim, electronic trading consultant, Fidelity Capital Markets
Johnmark Lim has joined Fidelity Capital Markets as an electronic trading consultant.
Based in New York, he will advise the firm’s electronic trading team led by Kavy Yesair.
Fidelity Capital Markets is part of Fidelity Investments, which holds more than US$6.8 trillion in client assets globally. The capital markets business offers trading, technology and execution services for institutional clients across multiple asset classes.
Lim has 18 years of industry experience and joins the firm from Citi, where he has been a director and electronic sales trader since 2020. Prior to this he spent more than 12 years at Credit Suisse, initially as vice president of equities legal and compliance before becoming a senior equities electronic trader for advanced execution services.
The US equity options market is having a moment. Volumes reported by the Options Clearing Corporation reached a record high in September, with 1.7 billion contracts traded. The driver for this was payment for order flow (PFOF), as tracked by oursuite of visualisation tools based on Rule 606 filings. Citadel Securities, which earns net trading revenues of more than $1 billion per month on average, is paying about $100 million for options flow.
The recipients of these payments are retail brokers, led by Robinhood and Schwab, with $110 million and $76 million respectively. These brokers offer zero-cost options trading to consumers, not just in the US but increasingly in Europe and Asia. And much of that is day trading using zero days to expiry (0DTE) contracts. According to CBOE, which itself reported record volumes in the third quarter, 56% of options volume in 2025 was for contracts expiring within less than one week.
This consumer activity is about entertainment rather than investment, but the institutional community sits back and enjoys the liquidity it brings.
Nick Dunbar
Managing Editor
Global Trading
Markets brace for conflicting liquidity shifts, a potential correction, AI bubble risks.
New Trader TV – Ben Ashby, chief investment officer at Henderson Rowe, discusses how year-end liquidity will be shaped by conflicting forces, including the US government reopening and the push for buy-sides to de-risk their books as they wrap up 2025. In this episode, the chief investment officer also shares his view on the huge volumes in retail trading this year and the potential for a market correction. He also unpacks whether AI valuations are sustainable long-term looks at the biggest risks to be watchful of in 2026, including a resurgence in US inflation.
In this episode:
📌 Conflicting forces shaping liquidity this end of year
We're Enhancing Your Experience with Smart Technology
We've updated our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy to introduce AI tools that will personalize your content, improve our market analysis, and deliver more relevant insights.These changes take effect on Aug 25, 2025. Your data remains protected—we're simply using smart technology to serve you better. [Review Full Terms] |[Review Privacy Policy] Please review our updated Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy carefully. By continuing to use our services after Aug 25, 2025, you agree to these
