Integration strengthens e-trading in persistently volatile markets

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J.P. Morgan’s 2026 e-Trading survey reveals that 43% of traders grapple with daily volatility, while technology now outranks liquidity as the top market structure concern

Institutional trading desks are operating in a market environment where volatility is no longer an episodic disruption but a daily, persistent feature.

According to J.P. Morgan’s 2026 annual e-Trading survey, 43% of respondents cite market volatility as their biggest daily trading challenge. At the same time, “developments in financial market technology” rank as the leading market structure concern, while 41% identify geopolitics as the dominant macro driver. The results point to a market environment shaped both by macro instability and accelerating electronic change.

For Biko Agozino, senior quant trader in fixed income, currencies and commodities, and Francesco Lucherelli, head of Execute derivatives product at J.P. Morgan, the findings reflect a structural shift. Volatility, technology and liquidity are no longer separate considerations. They are interdependent forces shaping how markets function.

Volatility as the baseline

Biko Agozino, J.P. Morgan

In the current regime, volatility must be built into trading design rather than treated as a temporary spike. “It is important for us to be able to react to evolving volatility throughout the day,” says Agozino. “There can always be idiosyncratic moves, which can cause our systems, if they’re not calibrated well, to compromise an uninterrupted service to our clients.”

In systematic strategies, this becomes particularly acute when correlations begin to shift.

“Often, in systematic trading, we’re trading instruments that are highly correlated with each other – it can be a spot versus futures basis, for example,” he explains. “But, when volatility increases, that spot and futures basis may decorrelate, and the long-held assumptions about the market structure may break down.”

The challenge is detecting those breakdowns quickly enough to respond. “It’s very important that we can have the data to identify that breakdown proactively, and have the tools and systems in place to react once we’ve identified it.”

In derivatives markets, volatility translates directly into rapidly shifting risk profiles. Lucherelli notes that, when markets move quickly, execution tools become central to position management. “The concern in the current scenario is that, if the tools at your disposal aren’t up to speed, it becomes impossible to manage your position effectively,” he says.

Technology as market structure

The survey’s most striking finding may be that “developments in financial market technology” now outrank “access to liquidity” as the leading market structure concern.

Traders increasingly see risk embedded into infrastructure as much as in price movements. One driver of this concern is the scale of market data. “We’ve seen market data volumes surge over the past few years,” says Agozino. “Platforms across foreign exchange markets are changing their minimum quote lives and update frequencies, which has caused a massive increase in updates from market data providers. Coupled with more non-bank market-makers entering the space, there is much more data being processed across the Street.”

Francesco Lucherelli, J. P. Morgan

That surge puts pressure on systems. In electronic markets, small delays can have outsized consequences. “The minimum acceptable latency has reduced by several orders of magnitude,” Agozino notes. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be high-frequency to perform, but you need a system that can scale with the amount of data being passed through.”

For Lucherelli, the implication is that workflow simplicity and infrastructure resilience matter as much as pricing. “We are very focused on simplifying the trader workflow,” he says, pointing to background latency, system stability and even login processes as areas where friction must be reduced. The objective within J.P. Morgan’s Execute single-dealer platform is to bring market data, execution and advanced analytics into a personalised, unified environment rather than forcing clients to manage multiple disconnected systems.

Geopolitics and de-correlation

Layered onto technological complexity is geopolitical uncertainty. With 41% of respondents identifying geopolitics as a dominant driver, external shocks are increasingly treated as recurring rather than exceptional events.

Agozino points to tariff proposals and international de-risking as recent catalysts for basis dislocations. “We’ve seen a lot of de-correlation between basis trades,” he says. “For example, the gap between a US-domiciled settlement versus a foreign settlement.”

In commodities and precious metals, basis relationships between London, New York and Shanghai have become more volatile, reflecting supply-demand imbalances and physical delivery constraints. In response, demand has grown for tools that allow clients to trade those dislocations more systematically. “Having the ability for clients to trade a New York-settled instrument versus a London-settled instrument as an arbitrage product is a very interesting emergent theme,” Agozino says.

Platforms must therefore provide not only execution access but also the real-time visibility needed to identify when those relationships diverge.

Liquidity as conditional access

The survey results suggest liquidity is no longer viewed as a static pool but as something conditional on venue, timing and market regime.

Electronification has expanded connectivity, but it has also increased fragmentation across single-dealer platforms, multi-dealer venues and exchanges. “On the positive side, fragmentation allows a counterparty to hide its market impact footprint by choosing where to execute,” says Agozino. Avoiding highly visible centralised venues can reduce information leakage.

At the same time, fragmentation increases operational complexity, requiring connectivity across multiple application programming interfaces, protocols and regulatory frameworks. For some participants, principal over-the-counter models offer a way to consolidate access. “Counterparties can integrate with a single provider, such as J.P. Morgan, to access these markets centrally,” he says. “That allows them to minimise market footprint while reducing the overhead of managing dozens of different venue integrations.”

Diverging paths of electronification

Electronification is not advancing uniformly across asset classes.

In FX options, Lucherelli says roughly 80–90% of electronic client flow now goes through Execute. “Clients prefer to rely on the bank’s single-dealer platform for complex derivatives because they trust the pricing and structuring expertise behind it,” he says. In rates derivatives, by contrast, regulation has historically driven execution towards multi-dealer venues, though that may be starting to change. Other asset classes are now catching up to FX options at different speeds.

The survey highlights expected growth in areas such as repo, exchange-traded funds and credit. In repo, J.P. Morgan has developed tools that allow for pricing large numbers of trades simultaneously, reflecting a broader push to apply electronic models developed in other asset classes to less electronified markets. “We are taking the expertise and workflows that worked in FX and replicating them for asset classes such as rates, credit and spreads,” Lucherelli says.

From speed to system resilience

As markets accelerate, the emphasis is shifting from raw speed to stability under stress.

“If we have significant latency in our system, it limits our ability to service the client,” says Agozino. “If you send too much data over a switch and it drops a message, that causes a latency spike. In the electronic world, that can be the difference between a successful trade and a sustainable relationship.”

Lucherelli adds that monitoring and control mechanisms are central to maintaining performance during volatile periods: “It’s about having the right technology checks to alert us at the right time.”

Looking ahead, the next stage of market evolution is likely to involve further integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and tokenised assets. “We use GenAI for requirement refinements and feedback input into technology tools,” Lucherelli says. “It helps us break down manual processes and speed up development.” For Agozino, that digital assets are natively electronic may simplify their integration into existing trading frameworks.

Taken together, the survey findings suggest that institutional trading is no longer simply about price discovery. In volatile markets, execution quality increasingly depends on how effectively data, analytics, liquidity access and infrastructure are integrated into a single, resilient environment.

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Explore the findings of J.P. Morgan’s 2026 e-Trading survey

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