Meet the Meraki Team: Partner & Global Head of Trading EJ Stockley
Welcome to this episode of “Meet the Meraki Team.”
Meraki Global Advisors is a leading outsourced trading firm that has redefined the traditional outsourced trading model to preserve the investment manager’s integrated and collaborative internal trading desk experience, enhance their sub-optimal trading desk practices, and alleviate growing cost burdens.
We have a special guest to share his wealth of experience and expertise. Joining us is EJ Stockley, Partner & Global Head of Trading of Meraki Global Advisors.
Prior to joining Meraki, EJ was a trader at First State Investments in the UK and Singapore. Gaining global multi-asset trading experience in Pan-Asian, EMEA, and Americas markets. In addition to trading responsibilities, EJ also was on the MiFIDII project team at First State UK. EJ began his career at Janus Capital on the operations team in Denver before relocating to Singapore to become a trader with an Asian market focus. He received his degree in Business Administration, with concentrations in Finance and Accounting, from Northeastern University.
In this episode, EJ will take us through his journey, sharing valuable lessons learned and how each experience shaped his approach to trading and risk management. This promises to be a captivating conversation with a true industry expert.
Let’s dive right in!
Q1: Can you start us off by telling us about your background and what brought you to Meraki?
I started my career in finance while in University in Boston, working for a fixed-income asset management company. After college, I moved to Colorado, where I started working for Janus Capital and after a few years working in the headquarters in Denver, I moved to their Singapore office where they’re building out an investment team. This was supposed to be a two-year stint, but I ended up staying in Singapore for about seven years. Halfway through my time in Singapore, I moved to First State Investments, which is the asset management arm for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
I moved to the First State to London where we created EMEA and the Americas, and helped get the desk become MiFID II compliant. I met Ben, I was a client of his during my time in Asia and we always stayed in touch after we went our separate ways. Ben told me about his thoughts for starting Meraki, and I thought it was a great opportunity and being able to live in Park City was pretty appealing as well.
Q2: With Meraki’s outsourced trading model being as close to an in-house trader as possible, what other responsibilities can your clients expect from their dedicated trader aside from execution?
Outside of execution, we monitor client’s portfolios for news, manage their commission wallets, help negotiate rates for high touch and electronic trading, manage their broker relationships, build custom reports around earnings, short interest, and position reporting, amongst various other things they might need. Whatever you need or expect from your trading desk is exactly what we think we should be able to deliver in a cost-effective manner.
Q3: Please explain how the experience level of your traders is of value to your clients.
Our traders have experience across regions, asset classes, and different types of asset managers and investment banks. Having experienced traders who’ve seen various market cycles and conditions, are familiar with trading various products, and having relationships with various business lines in the street are all crucial to providing the service our clients have become accustomed to. Our multi-asset experience allows us to connect to various parts of a firm perhaps a single product trading desk might not have access to.
Q4: How do you think your professional experience and that of Meraki could enable the firm to work with larger traditional institutions to incorporate an outsource trading desk?
Larger financial firms have historically had their own in-house traders, but it seems like they are starting to look at outsourcing more closely for various reasons. Whether it’s to cut costs, gain experience in markets or products that they aren’t as comfortable with, or to add supplemental support for their internal team. Given the range of experience of our employees with many of us working at large buy-side firms, we know how they work and know what they need to receive to gain the most from a trading desk. That coupled with our flexible, authorized trader model. I think we could offer the most seamless solution to their current business model while solving for their needs.
Q5: With most of your traders having broad international experience, how does this add value to your clients?
Every market or region has a unique market structure that can present difficulties on the trading side. Knowing where and how to access liquidity, having relationships with our clients counterparties, and knowing how to navigate each region or market is essential for us to adequately cover clients. In Europe, especially, there are multiple avenues for liquidity, and our experience allows us to know and create an environment that ignores what the street calls “toxic” liquidity, to ensure that information leakage on your order is minimized and best execution is achieved.
Q6: How does the work-life balance in Meraki impact the firm’s culture? Park City is not exactly a typical location for the headquarters of a global trading operation. With that in mind, how does the culture cultivated Meraki benefits its clients?
Post the pandemic, you’ve seen quite a few large financial institutions, opening offices in locations outside of the traditional financial centers. There are various reasons that this is happening, but I think people have realized you don’t need to be based in a financial center to successfully be in a financial business and offering employees an option to have a better work life balance is becoming more important.
Being headquartered in Park City gives us a unique offering for being able to attract and retain talent. Culture in our office is very important as we want our office to be a place people are looking forward to coming to, not dreading it. Most of our employees do things together outside of work, like skiing and interior, playing hockey after work for a team the company sponsors, or hiking and golfing in the summer.
Q7: When dealing with a spectrum of different portfolio management styles, how are you able to juggle the distinct needs of each, and what experiences in your career have contributed to your ability to do so?
Getting to know each portfolio manager or CIO needs from a trader is essential regardless of whether an internal or an outsourced trading desk. Working at large institutions and trading for various PMs, you realize that each individual you are covering expects and needs different things. At my previous roles, I was covering PMs across numerous different time zones and regions, so finding out what was important to them while they were asleep was essential. When we sign up a new client, this is a critical component of our onboarding, understanding exactly what these individuals want from their trading desk, we tailor a solution to fit those needs.
Q8: Meraki clients rave about the value add Meraki brings to how your outsourced trading model has made what were previously their pain points now triumph. What makes Meraki so unique and why hire your firm over other outsourced trading firms?
I think the two most important things that differentiate ourselves is keeping the lowest client to trader ratio in the industry and our unique authorized trader model. I don’t believe a trader can provide the service that we expect if they’re covering 10, 20, 30 clients, even three to five clients per trader allows us to really understand what our clients are looking for and really become ingrained in their portfolios. Our authorized trader model allows our clients to get recognition with all their counterparties so their commissions are easily attributable to the resources they use or acquire. We firmly believe this model removes all conflicts and keeps things as seamless as possible for our end clients.
About Meraki Global Advisors
Meraki Global Advisors was founded with a rebellious determination to deliver truly conflict-free services to asset managers. Headquartered in Park City, Utah with offices in New York and Hong Kong, Meraki provides outsourced global multi-asset trading, leverage management, and capital introduction services to the asset management industry. Meraki Global Advisors LLC is a FINRA member and SEC Registered. Meraki Global Advisors (HK) Ltd is licensed and regulated by the Securities & Futures Commission of Hong Kong.
For more information, visit the Meraki Global Advisors website and LinkedIn page
Contact:
Mary McAvey
VP of Business Development
(646) 666-7041
mm@mga-us.com
