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In a supposed victory for banks and trading organizations, the European Commission apparently will scale back the financial transaction tax significantly. But here are 5 reasons why the anti-FTT lobby should not relax just yet.

The electronification of the over-the-counter derivatives market is happening much more quickly than anyone would have guessed. And it is driving a shift from the use of equity derivatives primarily for hedging to their use in the pursuit of alpha.

IFMA has come out in support of Bloomberg’s request to the CFTC to reduce the 5-day VaR calculation if initial margin for swaps to the same 1-day VaR requirement for futures.

With the shift in the corporate bond market from voice to electronic trading, and from capital facilitation by dealers to agency facilitation, will the largest institutional investors commit their own capital to replace that which has been withdrawn by dealers?

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) continued its progress this week toward a scheme for regulating global swap transactions, culminating in a final framework for regulated cross-border activities of US and non-US swap dealers.

Today, the European Commission and the CFTC announced a deal that will end the regulation overlap of the swaps market between the two regulatory bodies.

Many swap end users assumed they would be exempt from CFTC position limits because most of their transactions would qualify as bona fide hedges. Based on the most recent CFTC proposals, however, they were wrong.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been receiving swap trade reports for a few years, but it can’t seem to make sense of some, or much, of it. In order to fulfill the Commission’s regulatory mandates of monitoring systemic risk, market abuse and general oversight, the data has to be much better.

Swaps compression activity was exceptional in March, helping drive a jump in on-SEF trades and propelling Tradeweb ahead of Bloomberg in the race for SEF market share.

In waiting to publish rules for swap data reporting until February 2015, the SEC has taken it a bit easier in its rulemaking than the CFTC.