Intermediaries and venues
Who provides liquidity, where trading happens and how market structure changes behaviour under stress.
Clearing, settlement and data
The plumbing that turns trades into transfers, and the information that prices depend on.
Cross-market contagion
Leverage, collateral, common exposures and correlated strategies that carry stress between markets.
Under normal conditions, markets look deep and continuous. Under stress, liquidity can vanish: dealers step back, margin calls force sales, funding markets tighten and prices move further than fundamentals justify. Episodes such as the global financial crisis, the market turmoil at the start of the pandemic and sharp moves in government bond markets have shown how quickly stress travels from one market to another through common holdings, leverage, collateral and the infrastructure that connects them.
The system has become more interconnected and, in places, more concentrated. Central counterparties clear large volumes of derivatives and repo; a small number of index providers, data vendors, custodians and cloud services sit beneath many firms; passive and systematic strategies can cause many investors to move in the same direction. Digital assets, tokenisation and artificial intelligence add new instruments and new correlations. Real-economy shocks, from wars and sanctions to climate events and cyber incidents, reach markets through all of these channels.
The industry problem is shared understanding: how structure, information and infrastructure shape the way risk propagates, so that participants, infrastructures and authorities can each act on a common factual base.
