Nomura Holdings is
bolstering its foreign-exchange and emerging markets trading
teams in Asia on the view that volatility will persist, driving
demand from its clients.
Japan’s biggest brokerage also expects the favourable market
conditions that drove global equities to all-time highs will
soon reassert themselves as geopolitical tensions ease and
record oil prices retreat.
“Our macro businesses tend to perform well in periods of
volatility. So that has been a big theme for us and probably is
going to continue being one of our main focus areas,” Nomura’s
head of global markets, Rig Karkhanis, said in an interview with
Reuters this week.
The macro business spans interest rates, foreign exchange
and emerging markets trading, which clients use to diversify and
rebalance their portfolios.
Despite expecting prolonged volatility, Karkhanis projects
the overall favourable environment for stocks has another two
years to run, driven by large-scale investment in artificial
intelligence infrastructure that will boost productivity and
growth.
“My base case is we’ll see a normalisation of geopolitical
risk. Oil price volatility is likely a short-term phenomenon and
we should go back to where we were two or three months ago,” he
said.
Nomura’s latest recruitment drive builds on the turnaround
in its markets business in recent years, as it has sought to
assert itself as a global player and maintain profits regardless
of market conditions.
Karkhanis said Nomura is also hiring for its U.S. rates
business under new head of U.S. rates Moritz Westhoff, who was
appointed in August last year.
He declined to specify the scale of any of the hiring.
Nomura beefed up its spread products business – primarily
credit trading – around two and a half years ago as interest
rates began to be cut worldwide, and bolstered equities trading
a year or so ago in a wager that share markets would rally.
Broad market volatility over the past year has been a boon
for Nomura’s trading revenue, which climbed to 716 billion yen
($4.5 billion) in the first nine months of the fiscal year
ending in March.
“Next year I think it’ll be another very strong year,”
Karkhanis said.
JAPANESE DEBT IN DEMAND
A normalisation of geopolitical tensions should bring down
yields for long-end Japanese government bonds, he said.
Demand for the debt has been growing as global asset
managers increase allocations, particularly at the long end,
where yields are similar to those of comparable European bonds,
Karkhanis said. If domestic asset managers also increase
purchases, then long-end JGB yields have room to come down even
further, he added.
The challenge for the industry is finding traders who have
experience with JGB yields at levels not seen since Japan’s
bubble economy of the 1980s and early 1990s.
“We would love to hire more JGB traders,” Karkhanis said.
“Japan rates traders are probably the most in demand globally,
so it’s highly competitive.”
Published on March 12, 2026
