As sell-side commissions continue to compress and more buy-side firms adopt MiFID II’s research unbundling globally, more sell-side analysts are setting up shop as independent research providers.
“It is hard to support a bloated sales trading/research model as most of the equity trading market share is floating up to the top four or five players,” Mike Kronenberg, CEO of Analyst Hub, told Traders Magazine’s sister publication Markets Media. “You are starting to the analysts see their work life compressed whether that’s talking them down on compensation, asking them to cut P&E, such as Bloomberg, subscriptions, and status services.”
Kronenberg envisioned the trend only accelerating as he estimated that between approximately 70 and 85 percent of equities trading is done electronically and would reach as high as 90 percent eventually.
The continued migration has put further competitive pressure on the non-global broker-dealers and their research departments as well as leading to a slide in their revenues, he added.
The pricing of research continues to fall, and no one knows when it will stabilize, but it likely will be less than broker-dealers had been charging.
“We are in only the first or second inning of what is going to be a move to paying for research with something besides your trading dollars,” said Kronenberg.
The move towards independent research has fueled an explosion in research aggregators like Analyst Hub, ResearchExchange, VisibleAlpha, and Red Deer that approach the issue in their respective ways.
Analyst Hub, which stated in October 2017 and closedits first round of funding in January, offers analysts the necessary infrastructure to start their businesses and be in compliance to sell their services to the buy side, according to Kronenberg.
“We work with compliance offices on the buy side, and we see everything from getting them up in business to getting a check from an institution so that they can focus on research,” he added.
Kronenberg also noted that the research pie was large enough to support multiple independent research aggregators.
“If there are 700 accounts that have multi-million dollar wallets for research, you do not need a lot of them to create a nice subscription-based business for yourself,” he added.
