“Utility is success,” Thomas Edison once claimed, arguing he wasn’t motivated to invent things that didn’t sell well: if no-one used them, what was the point?

Firms with competing visions of a more robust post-trade architecture for futures and options might bear this in mind. Market participants think standardizing trade allocations could prevent a repeat of the chaos that resulted from the thousands of trade breaks witnessed during last year’s Covid volatility, with many calling for a new