Asia Risk interdealer survey 2009: Dealers

The over-the-counter interdealer derivatives market effectively broke at the height of the financial crisis meaning the ability of dealers to lay off their risks became severely restrained. While the market has recovered, its future direction and relevance is still open to question.

Traditionally, the interdealer market has performed the function of enabling professional market counterparties to lay off sizeable chunks of risk with one another in an efficient manner. This is typically facilitated by interdealer brokers that take a commission for their efforts to help source prices for large-risk positions.

As dealers have increasingly sought to offset risks internally by matching trades across trading books and operating units through the set-up of electronic trading