l'euronext-liffe all'attacco del Bund con i nuovi derivati basati sugli indici dell'euromts, ogni tanto date uno sguardo al sito mts.org , c'è roba interessante
forse non moriremo bundaroli
FO Week Issue 1136 11-Sep-2006
Euronext Liffe revisits bond futures contracts
by Elliott Aykroyd
As exclusively revealed in FO Week (see Vol 11 No 9), Euronext Liffe last week confirmed plans to offer futures contracts on bond indices, developed in conjunction with bond index provider EuroMTS, in a move that many believed could spark competition with Eurex's benchmark Bund contract.
The new contracts have been scheduled for launch on 13 November, and were to be independent total-return indices measuring the performance of a range of Eurozone government and non-government bonds, based on real-time tradeable prices from the EuroMTS system.
“What people have been looking for since the European monetary union began in 1999 is a way of being able to trade pan-European debt for overall exposure. The normal ‘cheapest to deliver futures’ contract can never do that,” Amanda Sudworth, head of interest rate product development for Euronext Liffe, told FO Week.
She said she believed customers would be interested in that exposure and in the ability to trade something other than just German debt. The exchange planned to launch a pan-European Eurozone contract and individual country-based contracts on French, Italian and German debt.
Sudworth added that many people have found it very difficult to trade cash government bond markets because of their expense and associated paperwork. At present, she said, the only alternative has been German debt futures contracts offered by Eurex and so the new index contracts would provide greater choice.
Market response was mixed last week with some remaining sceptical that Euronext Liffe’s offering could gain significant volume in the face of the widely-accepted Bund. A senior executive at one UK-based trading firm said that, as he saw the situation, there was no need for other interest rate derivatives as the German debt contracts on Eurex had become the accepted proxy for pan-European debt.
He thought that the contracts may have been developed with a specific market in mind, but that it was unlikely to be the same people who traded the Eurex contracts, which he believed to be too strong to be effectively challenged.
Others, however, expressed interest in the launch, although few were prepared to make a firm commitment to trading. One market source said that it was “interesting” to see Euronext Liffe returning to the bond market, its former entity Liffe having lost the Bund contract to Eurex in 1999, but added that he thought enough time had passed for potential traders to have confidence in the new contracts.
Launch planned since MTS deal
Euronext Liffe's return to the bond market did not come as a great surprise to many, with one source saying that it had "been on the cards" since the exchange took a stake in MTS in 2005. He added that some more traditional asset managers might be interested in the product, but they would probably not attract dedicated government bond traders.
“I can’t really see why a traditional government bond trader would get involved in that. A traditional asset manager and to a larger extent a bond trader who wants to do tactical asset allocation, [but] then one of the issues for them would be liquidity, so it would be crucial for the contracts to build liquidity quickly,” he said.
He did think that it may come down to basis risk against liquidity risk, so even if the index products made more sense to some traders they would nevertheless revert to where the liquidity was.
Sources suggested that Eurex might not see the new contracts as a threat. Even when Euronext Liffe launched a market making programme for the products, those market makers would most likely be proprietary trading firms and those firms have tended to lay off their positions in new contracts with trades in liquid products, so Eurex could even benefit from the launch in the short term.
Sudworth said, however, that the contracts would be attractive to government bond traders, fund managers, equity traders, index traders and Locals alike. She added that there would be a market making scheme for the products but that that programme had yet to be put out to tender.
According to Sudworth, in the first quarter of 2007 Euronext Liffe would follow up with the launch of a futures contract on an index from the EuroMTS inflation linked bond index family. She said that the exchange wanted to wait until the market had become more accustomed to the broad appeal of straight bond index contracts before launching the more niche inflation contracts.
A source close to Eurex said that the exchange had not looked at launching the same contracts but had been looking at opportunities in corporate bonds as well as emerging market index products for traders who have found it difficult to get in and out of those markets.
A spokesperson for Eurex told FO Week, “We consider ourselves very well positioned with our offering in the fixed income derivatives space. The Bund future is one of the most successful futures contracts in the world and is the benchmark product in the European fixed income markets. Two of its key characteristics are very deep liquidity and physical delivery, and that seems to be what the market wants.”
