Alder has close to three decades of industry experience and joins the firm from Barclays Investment Bank, where he was most recently director of EMEA equities electronic sales trading.
Prior to this, Alder spent more than 10 years at Instinet in global portfolio trading roles. He began his career at UBS Investment Bank, covering global portfolio trading and restructuring.
Liquidnet reports average daily liquidity of US$93 billion, and more than 1,000 member firms.
Andrew Arnold and Jason Lichten will lead the new division from New York. The pair joined Liquidnet as senior execution traders in April. Arnold covers high touch US equity options, and Lichten low touch US equity options.
During his close to 20-year career, Arnold has held senior equity derivative sales roles at Credit Suisse, Cantor Fitzgerald, Bay Crest Partners and Tullett Prebon.
Lichten has more than 25 years of experience, including over a decade as director of equities and listed derivatives trading strategies at Wolverine Execution Services. Prior to this, he was vice president of electronic trading strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
Alternative trading system (ATS) OneChronos has been approved as a regulated UK entity by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The company, which has recently become one of the US’s top ten equities venues in FINRA rankings, will launch its multilateral trading facility (MTF) in the country, putting it in competition with established players such as Aquis, CBOE Europe and Liquidnet.
The Smart Market periodic auctions model matches counterparties based on price, size and trader objectives – but not speed.
Scott Bradley, CEO of OneChronos Markets UK, stated, “This milestone reflects our commitment to bringing a fundamental innovation to trading venue operations, aligning execution outcomes more closely with participants’ objectives and improving overall market efficiency.”
The news follows OneChronos’ launch in Japan earlier this year. The firm is also planning on European regulatory approval too, it has confirmed, with a regional base in Amsterdam.
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The Modernization Mandate: Who Calls the Shots on Trading Tech?
Capital markets are at a critical inflection point, with firms navigating a complex transition from legacy systems to a more agile, modern tech stack. The path forward is full of strategic choices, from how to deploy new technology to who holds the decision-making authority.
Global Trading partnered with Adaptive to interview 50 capital markets professionals across the US, APAC, and EMEA to uncover key trends and evolving patterns in technology deployment. This report provides a benchmark for your firm to assess its own strategy against that of its peers in a rapidly changing industry.
Hong Kong IPOs are booming, but international investors are getting squeezed out of allocations by cornerstone investors and ‘clawback’ listing rules that favour retail, forcing funds to use block trades and risk priced liquidity to alleviate the squeeze.
Hong Kong has surged as the top global non-US IPO venue in 2025. In the first nine months of 2025, 66 companies had raised US$23.2 billion. More than 90% of listed IPOs this year are up on listing price, and several have doubled from their first day of trading.
The bigger floats too, have delivered and kept going up from IPO day. Bubble tea chain Mixue priced at HK$202.50, up 45% on its first day, was trading HK$376 on 7 October, up 86% since listing.
Battery giant CATL raised $4.6 billion in May and closed up 16% on day one; it is now trading at HK$547 or 115% above its HK$263 IPO price.
Last month’s US$3.2bn spin-off, Zijin Gold, priced at HK$71.59, surged by 65% on its first day; now trading at HK$144, it trades at 106% above IPO price.
These IPOs illustrate how scarce and in demand HK listed paper is for non-cornerstone institutional investors, exacerbated by ‘clawback’ rules which ensure that oversubscribed retail orders get the lion’s share of allocations.
On trading floors, the appetite for IPOs is real but getting allocations is extra hard.
“We’re all trying to get into these deals,” says George Molina, who leads trading across Asia, emerging markets and Latin America at Franklin Templeton. “Valuations are more realistic than five or ten years ago, but if you’re not in as a cornerstone or anchor—and with retail on top—you’re often competing for maybe a quarter to a third of the book.”
The actual percentages vary widely from deal to deal, subject to consumer brand recognition.
For Mixue, aggregated retail orders were huge with the initial offered tranche of 1.7 million shares oversubscribed 5258 times, triggering the maximum clawback and lifting the Hong Kong public offer retail shares allotted to 8.5m shares (50% of the deal). Cornerstones took 7.7 million shares, or 45%. That left 0.8 million shares or 4.9% in the international tranche for non-cornerstone institutions on day one—essentially a rounding error for global funds.
CATL’s IPO was more friendly to international investors. Despite the retail tranche being 151 times oversubscribed, no claw back was organized. After the greenshoe was fully exercised, the Hong Kong public offer (the retail part) was 10.2m shares (7.5%) and the international offering 125m shares, or 92.5%. Cornerstones investors subscribed to 77.4 m shares, or 57.1%, leaving 48m shares, or 35.4% for non-cornerstone institutions.
George Molina, Franklin Templeton
Huge retail demand had tightened available liquidity further. “When a deal is oversubscribed, the clawback grows—and Hong Kong now allows ‘double-dipping’, so a cornerstone can also apply in the public offer,” Molina says. “It makes scarce paper even scarcer.” Given the extreme volatility, trying to buy IPO shares in the secondary market via the exchange is a hopeless task, leaving block trading as the only alternative.
Seeking ‘natural blocks’ from traditional sources only helps up to a point, Molina told Global Trading. “Blocks are happening, but you see fewer hedge funds taking the other side, more risk now sits with brokers, and wholesale market makers like Virtu, Jane Street, Citadel Securities and Millennium are providing liquidity because they can hedge it more ways.”
These ELPs are even happy to offer 1 to 2 percent of average daily volume (ADV). Market sources this service is offered for around eight basis point brokerage.
At Franklin Templeton, execution is split accordingly. “Roughly 40% of our Asia flow runs on algos—mainly when we’re at 5% ADV. Above that, we go high-touch and speak to as many brokers as we can. About 50% of our business is high touch,”, Molina said.
New HKEX rules are codifying the squeeze
On 5 August 2025, HKEX and the SFC implemented the IPO price discovery and open market reforms. Issuers now choose between two initial retail allocation frameworks. Mechanism A with a minimum 10% dedicated to retail, with stepped-up clawbacks depending on retail demand, or Mechanism B with a minimum 5% retail with a different clawback ladder. The reforms also relax restrictions on cornerstone investors, expressly allowing participation in both pre-IPO placings and the initial public offering under prescribed conditions (“double-dipping”).
The changes hard-wire larger retail tranches and permit more overlap between cornerstones investors and the public market. This thins the liquidity available to institutional investors.
On big deals, the dynamic collides with index inclusions and reweightings.
Molina said: “Mega deals, think CATL and other $5 billion-plus offerings—get re-weighted into benchmarks pretty quickly, which forces passive money to chase,””
With Q4 pipelines looking busy – as of 30 September 277 companies were in the pipeline according to HKEX – Molina’s team filters hard for deals that can deliver portfolio-relevant size. “If an allocation looks like US$5 million, it may not be worth the work,” he says. “You need early engagement—anchors or cornerstones where feasible—plus targeted high-touch around pricing, pre-agreed channels with brokers and the wholesale market makers, and disciplined aftermarket adds keyed to index events.”
Retail flows remain a real-time signal of possible liquidity squeeze and further post IPO demand. Mixue’s retail book, for example, drew more than HK$1.6 trillion in orders, triggering the top clawback step.
In Hong Kong’s 2025 IPO market, relying on blocks and IPO allocation alone rarely solves the exposure problem. The combination of bigger retail tranches permitted cornerstone “double-dipping,” and fast index inclusion means meaningful positions come from seeking exposure pre-IPO and multi-channel execution.
After the shock closure of UBS’s outsourced trading unit earlier this year, State Street is expanding its European ‘partnered trading’ business and onboarding the Swiss bank’s senior staff.
The company does not break down its revenues for outsourced trading. Overall, total revenues were up 8% year-on-year to US$3.4 billion in the second quarter of 2025.
Dirk Heim, previously head of UBS’ execution hub in Europe, joins State Street in Frankfurt. Throughout his 25-year career, Heim has been a trader in London and Frankfurt at firms including Quoniam Asset Management, Kepler Cheuvreux and BTG Pactual.
Also joining the Frankfurt team is Nicole Lindermayr, former multi-asset trader at UBS’s execution hub. Lindermayr’s more than 25 years in the industry include a 12-year stint at Goldman Sachs, where she rose to executive director of programme trading.
Other ex-UBS outsourcing traders have joined competitors in recent months, with firms seeking to nab market share.
State Street’s outsourcing expansion has also seen Matthew Hodges appointed as a multi-asset trader in London. His close to 20-year career has been spent at Western Asset Management, most recently as a senior trader and senior portfolio analyst.
The firm’s head of EU trading Daniel Eichhorn is relocating from Lisbon to Frankfurt as part of the reorganisation. He joined the firm in late 2023.
After boosting equity market infrastructure and aligning with international standards, Middle Eastern countries have seen surging capital inflows and IPO pipelines on the back of indexation changes. Market participants tell Global Trading about the quirks of trading this fast growing market
In September, the Saudi Capital Market Authority announced that it may lift the 49% cap on foreign ownership of listed companies. The announcement sparked a rally in the market, which jumped 5% and recovered almost half of its losses year-to-date.
“If the cap is lifted and the MSCI and FTSE indices would rebalance, you could see between
Cathy Gibson, global head of trading at Ninety One.
US$9 billion and US$10 billion of inflows into the region,” noted Cathy Gibson, global head of trading at Ninety One. “It’s a clear indication that Saudi is open to foreign investment, which is definitely a positive for the region.”
Foreign participation in the Saudi market has already skyrocketed over the past decade, according to UBS’s Ahmed Badr, head of global markets execution services MENA. “It used to be less than 1% of daily turnover. Today, it can go up to 30%, whether by QFI or swaps,” he says. “You’re talking about a huge difference.”
A long road
It’s been a long journey to get to this point. “North African countries, and specifically Egypt, have been open to international investors for quite some time. They were quite
Salah Shamma, head of investment and portfolio manager, Franklin Templeton
advanced early on, from the early 2000s, and interacting with international investors. The culture was geared towards trying to attract that investment. GCC countries didn’t have that. These were mainly local markets, relatively new in nature, dominated by local investors, mainly retail,” says Franklin Templeton’s head of investment and portfolio manager Salah Shamma.
In 2012, the UAE and Qatar began to push for their markets to be included in emerging markets analysis. After developing market infrastructure to fit the criteria, aligning better with best practices and establishing disclosure agreements for international investors, foreign capital began to flow in.
When a country’s stocks are added, it often boosts their appeal to foreign investors and can potentially result in significant capital inflows. Inclusion in such indices tends to enhance
Belinda Mar, equities market structure and product development, Bank of America
liquidity in local equity markets and provides access to international investment that was previously out of reach,” explained Belinda Mar, equities market structure and product development at Bank of America. Seeing the success, other countries in the region were inspired and followed suit, Shamma notes.
Increased activity in the region, which the Saudi market represents about 80% of, has made MENA a formidable presence in emerging markets indices. “If you wind the clocks back, before 2019 these markets were not a part of MSCI,” Badr says. “Now, MENA is more than 8%. It’s quite significant, especially with the exit of Russia. It’s on every international investor’s radar, in the basket of every investor. We’re seeing a lot of inflows from that perspective.”
“It’s a region to be reckoned with, and it’s no longer an opportunistic trade,” Shamma affirms. “As GCC markets entered emerging market indices, international investors had to adjust their allocations, resulting in a marked increase in foreign ownership and participation.”
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And the region’s importance is only going to increase, he says. “Based on our expected IPO pipeline, expected increases in foreign ownership limits and potentially further sell-downs or strategic sell-downs, that size potentially increases to 10-11% of the EM index.”
Exchanges are keen to keep momentum up. “They’ve been very active with the investment banks,” says Badr. “There are full teams in the Saudi and Dubai financial markets attending
Ahmed Badr, head of global markets execution services MENA, UBS
conferences, going on the road, seeing investors globally. They’re very active in promoting their exchanges to international institutional investors, and they’re really listening to how they need to develop further to attract more foreign investment.”
In Saudi, authorities have been “reasonably active” in their attempts to boost foreign investor participation, Gibson says – and have also been upping their own participation in local markets and encouraging local investments to the region.
“Retail investors play a critical role in enhancing market liquidity and diversity,” Mar says, further supporting the overall market. Gibson adds that high net worth individuals, of which there are a concentration in the region, are also highly influential. Encouraging these players to invest in the region is key to keeping the markets liquid and attracting more foreign investors.
And the foreign investors are coming; Middle Eastern markets have shifted from being overwhelmingly retail-led to having a more balanced, 50/50 retail/institutional split.
Of the ten banks with the highest equity capital markets (ECM) revenues in the Middle East for the first nine months of the year, ranked by Dealogic, just three are regionally specific. SNB Capital sits in seventh place by ECM revenues, with US$12 million and a 4% market share, while First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) ranked ninth with a reported US$10 million and a 3.3% share. Saudi Fransi Capital was in 10th place, with US$9 million and a 3.2% share. The three banks fell from fifth, sixth and eighth spot respectively.
At the top of the table, Morgan Stanley had the greatest share of ECM revenues in the region – 12.9%, represented by US$38 million. It was followed by Citi (US$30 million, 10.2%) and Jefferies (US$23 million, 7.8%). All three rose in the rankings year-on-year, from third, fourth and ninth.
“If we look back to when we started trading the Saudi Arabian markets here at T Rowe
Nick Wilkes, head of EMEA equity trading, T Rowe Price
Price, we primarily found ourselves trading against local investors. This has changed however as the market has evolved rapidly over the past 10 years. There’s a broad international investor community now active in this market,” said Nick Wilkes, Head of EMEA equity trading at T Rowe Price.
“I think we’ve got a very nice balance. I don’t think it needs to be more institutionalised now,” Badr muses. “Other structural changes are more important.”
There have also been significant trading infrastructure investments across the region in recent years, including colocation facilities in Saudi and Turkey – creating fertile ground for low-latency, high-frequency trading. Jane Street announced earlier this year that it would be opening an Abu Dhabi office.
“Evolving technology and brokers providing colocation have enticed quant and high-frequency trading firms to the market, changing the liquidity profile,” says Wilkes. “It’s modernising, and we have to adapt to that.”
ID, please
The majority of Middle Eastern countries run ID markets, which require foreign investors to identify themselves at each stage of a transaction. In the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar this is known as a National Investor Number (NIN), and in Saudi Arabia as a Custody Portfolio Account (CPA). IDs are not required in Turkey or Israel.
Opinions on this structure are mixed. Earlier this year, Invesco senior equity dealer Adrian Bradshaw told audiences at TradeTech that ID markets are labour intensive and prevent firms from using some algos when trading.
“If we have multiple funds on an order, we can’t use an algorithm – you have to set up five separate orders,” he explained.
That’s not the only thing limiting algo use. “Ultimately, these are single-exchange markets and so your tools aren’t necessarily going to work the same way as they do in other markets,” Wilkes said. “We talk about low-touch algorithms, they’re great for fragmentation, especially in liquidity seeking modes, but there aren’t necessarily secret liquidity pools out there at this stage in these markets. As they evolve, that could change.”
UBS’s Badr agrees that the ID market is a challenge. “Every portfolio, every fund, has to have an ID, and you allocate for them in the beginning,” he said. “There’s no omnibus structure in these markets, no post-trade allocation. Obviously, people want to send one line and then allocate everything post-trade.”
However, he acknowledges that exchanges in the region are listening to market participants’ calls for change: “They understand the needs of the market and the necessity of development.”
Others are less concerned about the impact that an ID market has on international investor appetite.
“I don’t think it’s hindered them from coming into the market,” says Shamma. “It’s not unique to the region. Other markets in the EM space require the same thing.”
“We can still block trade,” Gibson adds; it just requires a little more work for allocations to be made on an individual account level.
Primary
In the primary markets, the Middle East was flourishing in 2024 – with the region’s bourses outpacing European listings.
Yet in 2025, Saudi – which led the 2024 charge with US$3.8 billion of initial public offerings issued in SAR – faltered. The Middle East as a region issued US$4.6 billion between January and August, up 9% year-on-year (YoY). While this is a slight increase, it pales in comparison to other emerging markets; India’s IPO issuance was up 67% to US$9.63 billion.
On the decline, “I think it’s just a function of global markets,” Badr says. “As these markets become more global, and have more global players, they will be more affected by world events.”
He adds that some valuations last year might have been a bit rich, with the IPOs not performing as well as expected. “It’s normal that issuers will take a step back, wait a bit. There’s been a slowdown, but the pipeline keeps growing. Now it’s a question of when they’ll come to the market.”
As markets become more globally connected, it’s inevitable that they will become more standardised. A case in point: Gibson suggests that the growing popularity of 24/7 trading (or close to it) in the US may mean that Saudi’s Sunday-Thursday opening hours may be less of an oddity going forward.
For now, though, traders need to be attuned to market idiosyncrasies and know how to adapt to them.
“You have to put the effort in,” says Wilkes. “If you had a uniformed process, global markets would get very boring. What makes EM exciting is the cultural differences and the nuances, understanding that and working out how to use them to your advantage.”
F/m Investments CIO urges diversification amid US political gridlock and AI boom
New Trader TV This Week – Political dysfunction in Washington and the ongoing US government shutdown will be major forces unsettling markets this week, says F/m Investments’s Alexander Morris. Speaking to Trader TV, the chief investment officer discusses what’s driving market sentiment, whether the AI boom is sustainable, and the likelihood of a broader market correction. He also discusses ways to approach the upcoming week and other market events to pay close attention to.
Abdoulaye Ba, head of multi-asset trading, Banque de Luxembourg
Abdoulaye Ba has been promoted to head of multi-asset trading at Banque de Luxembourg.
He replaces Quentin Gaget, who has held the role since 2023.
Banque de Luxembourg reported net profits of €79.4 million in 2024, up 5% year-on-year.
Ba has close to 20 years of industry experience and has been a multi-asset trader at the bank since January. Prior to this, he was a fixed income trader at service provider Natixis TradEx Solutions and a senior business analyst at Ostrum Asset Management.
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