[ C O V E R
S T O R Y
|
N E I L
J O S E P H ]
I
n many ways Neil Joseph is a perfect advert for career mo-
bility at JP Morgan Asset Management. The firm’s European
head of equity trading first joined the business around the
turn of the millennium on a placement year during his univer-
sity studies, about the same time that JP Morgan was being
acquired by Chase Manhattan in a $30 billion deal.
Clearly the firm made a good impression on Joseph, who,
freshly armed with a degree in Business Computing, re-joined
the firm in 2002 as part of its graduate training scheme within
the investment banking technology team working on fixed income.
“After two years I moved over to asset management where I worked on
trading technology, which was a really interesting time for me,” he says.
“That’s where I started to get my interest in the trading side of what was
going on.
“At that time there were a lot of different
changes going on in the trading space, so I was
able to partner with the desk and work with
them on the design of their future technology
landscape and relevant platforms to address
those changes that were happening both on
the desk and in the wider industry.”
Fifteen years after starting his initial role
with JP Morgan, Joseph now heads up the
European equity trading desk for the asset
management business based on the northern
embankment of London’s River Thames. But
his earlier work with the technology side of
JP Morgan Asset Management has formed a
consistent vein running throughout his career
and still represents a significant part of his
remit for the desk.
Within two years of joining the asset man-
agement side of the business, Joseph had de-
livered implementation of a fully FIX-integrat-
ed execution management system and its first
transaction-cost analysis system in the run-up
to the arrival of the first MiFID regime in late
2007. The challenges that the new regulatory
environment threw up for Joseph and his col-
leagues at the time were mitigated through the
adoption and continued development of these
technologies designed to optimise efficacy and
24 // TheTrade // Summer 2018
execution.
“Having delivered the
relevant tools that we
needed in terms of exe-
cution management sys-
tems connected through
FIX and enhancements
to our own proprietary
order management systems, we
then turned our focus to automa-
tion, which was exciting,” Joseph
recalls.
“We implemented our first auto-
mated trading system in July 2009,
which was probably one of the first
implementations of its kind. People
now talk about the ‘algo wheel’
– whereby as well as selecting
an algo it also selects the broker
to use, giving consistent data for
analytics and removing trader
behavioural bias – and I think we
were relatively early in building
this type of functionality.”
Co-locating talent
Joseph transferred to the JP
Morgan Asset Management trading
desk in 2010, which now trades all
European equity orders regard-
less of where that order came
from globally, comprised of three
developed market specialists, two
emerging market specialists, and
three program and automated trad-