Market intelligence firm Greenwich Associates has released a new report highlighting the top market structure trends to watch this year.
Notably, the firm sees blockchain technology moving from proof of concept to production in 2017. Greenwich said that despite its deep focus on complex market structure issues across equity, fixed-income and FX markets, its blockchain research was the most-read by its capital markets clients in 2016.
“In 2017, we’ll finally start to see the rubber meet the road, with talk converting to real implementations”, author Kevin McPartland wrote.
“Smart contracts look to be a key tenet in the capital markets distributed ledger technology (DLT) discussion, an area set to grow quickly in 2017. And don’t discount the value of virtual currency either. Regardless of whether Bitcoin reaches $1,000 by the end of the year, the ability to transfer value around the world with no middleman continues to have the biggest appeal.”
In addition to blockchain, the top market trends to watch in 2017 includes the Trump bump continuing to help markets, ETFs to keep growing despite eventual limits, Prop trading moves beyond trading, Cloud computing to become known simply as “computing”, and others.
