George Budd, vice president of equity sales, RBC Capital Markets
George Budd has been appointed vice president of equity sales at RBC Capital Markets. He is based in London.
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. The European equity sales trading teams are led by Luke Mackaill.
Last week, RBC Capital Markets named Tracey Brown as an EMEA cash equity sales trader.
Budd has six years of industry experience and joins the firm from Cavendish, where he was associate director of equity sales. He began his career as an investment analyst at JP Morgan.
Louchard has close to 20 years of industry experience and joins the market maker from AXA Investment managers, where he has been head of ETFs capital markets since 2022. Prior to this, he was head of ETFs at Euronext and an ETFs sales trader at Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking.
Since 2022, Louchard has also been a member of the Association Française de la Gestion financière’s ETFs Commission and EFAMA’s ETFs Task Force.
Andy Hill has joined alternative investment manager LMR Partners as head of European equity trading.
LMR holds approximately US$12 billion in assets under management and covers equities, credit, fixed income, volatility, commodities and events as its core asset classes. The equity strategy combines discretionary and systematic portfolios.
Hill has more than 20 years of industry experience and joins LMR from ExodusPoint Capital Management, where he has been part of the EMEA trading and execution services team since 2018.
Prior to this, he was a senior trader at Balyasny Asset Management and director of execution trading at Millennium Capital Partners.
Self-driving cars are becoming ubiquitous in cities like San Francisco, but are still a rare sight in most places. Experts like to talk of five or six stages of automation, starting with completely manual driving to fully automated. The big dividing line is between where machines are driving assistants, under human supervision, to where machines monitor the driving environment, and ask humans to help where needed.
A similar debate is taking place in trading. Small trades are like boring motorway driving, where the human leaves things to the automated assistant. High touch or complex orders are like icy country roads or busy city streets, where humans mostly take over. As this week’s feature article explores, buyside firms are still on the human side of the dividing line but increasingly are talking about their plans to cross over to the automated side.
Brussels’ European Commission (EC) has opened a formal antitrust investigation into a 1999 Nordic equity-derivatives cooperation between Deutsche Börse’s Eurex and what is now Nasdaq Helsinki, over suspicions the two exchange groups limited competition. Both exchanges argue they believe the cooperation was lawful, transparent, and pro competition.
The European Commission has launched a full antitrust probe into Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq to assess whether the two groups coordinated to not compete in the listing, trading and clearing of certain derivatives across the European Economic Area (EEA), focusing on a cooperation first struck in 1999 between Eurex and Finland’s then-HEX exchange, later acquired by Nasdaq.
The Commission said the arrangements may have involved demand allocation, price coordination and exchanging of commercially sensitive information, but stressed the opening of proceedings does not prejudge the outcome.
The EU action follows unannounced inspections at the two exchanges in September 2024. It is part of a broader Commission push against alleged collusion in market-infrastructure services.
Teresa Ribera, executive vice president (EVP) for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition said: “Competition rules help secure fair and open competition among financial exchanges and ensuring the proper functioning of the Capital Markets Union – a cornerstone for innovation, financial stability and growth in the interest of all European citizens.”
The competition branch of the Commission has not yet published the associated case files.
Elsewhere in Europe, Eurex rival Euronext has been building up competition in the equities derivatives space.
Nasdaq said, “[It] takes note of the European Commission’s decision to open an investigation into a historical cooperation, launched in 1999,” adding: “Nasdaq believes that the cooperation was lawful. It was discussed with the European Commission when it was announced, and no objections were ever raised until after the cooperation had ended. The cooperation delivered clear benefits for market participants, including access to deeper liquidity, narrower bid-ask spreads, lower fees, and enhanced cross-margining opportunities… The European Commission’s decision is a procedural step that does not imply any finding of wrongdoing or breach of competition law. Nasdaq is engaging constructively with the European Commission.”
Deutsche Börse Group, said in a statement it had “taken note” of the move and said: “The formal opening of an investigation is a procedural step that does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation.”
Deutsche Boerse also describes the 1999 deal as public, discussed with Brussels at the time, and intended to be pro-competitive by building liquidity in Nordic derivatives.
Deutsche Boerse added: “In alignment with our external counsel, we believe that we can successfully defend this case.”
Matti Konsala has joined Citi as an equities algo trader. He is based in London.
This addition to Citi’s equities team is the latest in a string of hires by the bank, which generated a reported US$136 million in equity capital markets revenues in the first nine months of 2025.
Konsala has a decade of industry experience and joins Citi after more than seven years at Goldman Sachs. He was most recently vice president of equities algo strategies at the firm.
Prior to this, he was an algorithmic trade support analyst at ITG.
Eurex is launching a sponsored access model for derivatives trading from 10 November, and is considering offering the same for cash equities on Xetra – 15 years after other European exchanges.
Sponsored access is a common feature of equity markets, allowing market participants to use their own proprietary electronic trading strategies on the exchange rather than a broker’s. Across Europe, the model is offered for equities by major exchanges including the London Stock Exchange (launched in 2011), Nasdaq Nordics (2009/10), Cboe (2009) and SIX, for the Swiss Stock Exchange.
Cboe offers sponsored access to its derivatives market, and Euronext offers sponsored access for its cash and derivatives markets. A sponsored access model for the repo market is expected to go live in Q2 2026.
The exchanges do not disclose sponsored access volumes. Euronext declined to comment on its sponsored access derivatives offering.
From 10 November, market participants will be able to directly access Eurex’s T7 trading platform when sponsored by an exchange member. They will operate using the trader ID of the sponsored access provider.
Any Eurex trading participant will be able to act as a sponsored access provider for indirect trading participants. They will be able to see trades through Eurex’s BU back-office session (a FIX interface), and orders through the enhanced drop copy service, and pre-trade risk limits for the indirect trading participants. They will also have access to a stop/release functionality.
Sponsoring members will hold responsibility for the user’s compliance with exchange-related legal provisions.
Heavy lobbying by the sell-side appears to have worked on the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), which published its final report on pre-hedging. Brushing aside calls for the practice to be banned, IOSCO insists that pre-hedging is a legitimate risk tool that benefits stakeholders if proper disclosures and documentation are in place.
Boris Molls.
Pre-hedging, where dealers hedge exposures based on requests for quotes (RFQs) or indications of interest (IOIs), without a firm order in place, is a controversial topic. Boris Molls, head of markets at Brightwell, which manages the £33 billion BT pension scheme, told Global Trading “I believe most execution traders would agree that pre-hedging is in most instances just another word for front-running. It’s a plausible way to explain behaviour and market moves that look like front-running as something that was done to benefit the client.”
Pre-hedging is popular among bank-owned market makers that can use their large balance sheets to fund over-the-counter derivatives trades, a luxury denied to newer electronic liquidity providers with comparatively small balance sheets.
“Pre-hedging is unacceptable and should be banned”, said Emma Lokko, head of market structure at market maker Susquehanna International Group, which sponsored a survey of buyside firms that largely echoed this view. In its submission to IOSCO, Susquehanna said that pre-hedging should be restricted to bilateral transactions, a view also expressed by Jane Street in a 2022 submission to ESMA. “Pre-hedging in the competitive RFQ context should not be permitted”, Jane Street said.
It was in the bilateral context that pre-hedging could be pinned down, Brightwell’s Molls explained. “Only in scenarios where the precise nature and purpose of the broker’s activity was transparently agreed in advance, could the practice be accepted”, he said.
However, after a long consultation, IOSCO’s final recommendations on pre-hedging dashes hopes that regulators will crack down. IOSCO defines pre-hedging as principal trading by a dealer, after receiving information about an anticipated client transaction but before the client has accepted the quote. To be considered pre-hedging, IOSCO says that dealers’ principal trades should aim to mitigate the risk related to the anticipated client transaction(s) with the intention of benefiting the client.
In its recommendation, IOSCO sets out principles that pre-hedging should be done fairly and minimise market impact. To that intent, IOSCO recommends that dealers provide clear disclosure of their pre-hedging practices to their clients and seek prior consent as well as limit the numbers of traders allowed to pre-hedge to facilitate monitoring.
IOSCO has been under pressure from banks that seek to use pre-hedging as a defence against hedge funds and other sophisticated buyside firms that game the RFQ process, a practice known as ‘drive bys’ amongst traders.
In its response to IOSCO, German bank Commerzbank said. “In reality, clients tend to trade in multiple clips without indicating the final size and banks often anticipate additional lots. With RFQs you also have the problem that customers may send “test RFQs” in sizes not identical to the final request to compare prices. Additionally, there is uncertainty if a client already traded or just asks multiple RFQs”.
France’s Natixis also complained about buyside abuse of RFQs in its IOSCO submission, “Many clients are not transparent on their Full size and split their amount in many slices in a very close period of time (which can create market impact and unfair losses to the makers which are not aware of the parent size order) to try circumvent the Spread they should pay for their genuine full size. No taker should use techniques to slice risk without the maker being able to be aware of it”.
Another trader at a large UK buyside firm agreed that IOSCO was right not to recommend an outright ban on pre-hedging by its member supervisors: “We believe that any pre-hedging should only be undertaken by a bank where it is discussed with the client beforehand and it is agreed that it is in the best interests of the client that pre-hedging should be expected to achieve a better outcome for the client”, the trader said. “We think those circumstances are extremely limited, but they do exist and hence they shouldn’t be banned under UK market conduct regulation.”
In the Susquehanna–Acuiti survey from 27 October where Acuiti polled an undisclosed number of European asset managers, Acuiti says: “92% of respondents said that pre-hedging has the potential to move the price away from their trade and provide a disadvantageous price.” The consultancy also adds that: “Over 80% of respondents believe dealers should only hedge their positions after the trade has been awarded.”
In a response to Global Trading, IOSCO said, “The Final Report on Pre-Hedging takes into account all views and extensive feedback from all market participants. A ban of the practice was never part of the discussion nor proposed by the majority of the buy-side, with very few individual exceptions”.
“Moreover, IOSCO is an international standard setting body, not a supranational regulator – financial regulation remains a matter of national sovereignty and IOSCO does not have the ability to ban any practice.”
Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund the Public Investment Fund (PIF) has expanded its partnerships with Northern Trust Asset Management (NTAM) and BlackRock as it pushes ahead with the country’s Saudi Vision 2030 initiative.
The market cap of Saudi stocks, tracked by MSCI, is currently US$2.3 trillion.
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A new quant investment strategy from NTAM will identify and capture sources of excess return in the Saudi and MENA equity markets, the firm says, using data science, alternative data sources and quant models. It is currently exclusively a PIF vehicle.
NTAM and PIF signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in May as part of the region’s Saudi Vision 2030 initiative, part of which aims to increase the country’s capital markets and asset management sector.
NTAM’s regional headquarters for the Middle East has been based in Saudi Arabia since 2023. It manages US$48 billion in quantitative strategies globally, covering equities and fixed income. Performance is not broken down on an asset class or regional level.
PIF has also expanded its partnership with BlackRock, which manages US$128 billion on behalf of clients in Saudi Arabia. The investment manager launched a Saudi systematic equity strategy in January, and a Saudi index equity strategy in May. It will now offer mutual funds based on Saudi systematic equities and MENA fixed income through BlackRock Riyadh Investment Management (BRIM), established in April 2024.
Tracey Brown, EMEA equity cash sales trader, RBC Capital Markets
Tracey Brown has joined RBC Capital Markets as an EMEA equity cash sales trader, based in London.
She reports to Luke Mackaill, head of European equity sales trading teams.
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.
Earlier this year, RBC Capital Markets expanded its EMEA equity derivatives team in the UK.
