National Bank sells research; the quoting desk is the moat

Canada's ETF market absorbed CAD125 billion of new money in 2025, a record by Daniel Straus's account and a pace he says has held so far this year. Straus runs ETFs and financial products research at National Bank of Canada Capital Markets, and the figure arrives in an ETF Express interview pegged to four category wins: best capital markets team, best overall ETF liquidity provider and market maker, best market maker or authorised participant for equity ETFs, and best ETF research provider in Canada. Measured against the almost CAD1 trillion that nearly 50 Canadian providers manage, last year's haul works out to roughly twelve cents of new money for every dollar already in the ecosystem. At that rate, scarcity shifts from product ideas to capacity to quote what the ideas create.

National Bank's answer is that the two functions belong on one desk. The interview pairs Straus with Frederic Viger, co-head of institutional sales for ETFs and equity derivatives, and the pair argue that a desk ranked first in market making can underwrite an independent research team. In practice, that team is five analysts and associates publishing theme pieces, strategy notes and flow reports, covering every Canadian and US ETF and fielding dozens of requests a week from wealth managers. Viger frames the effort as more than two decades spent building a full-service offering for issuers, advisors, retail investors and institutional money managers.

Research, on this model, is the front end of an inventory business: it produces the queries, the queries produce the relationships, and the relationships route the order flow that the quoting desk monetizes in the spread. Best overall liquidity provider and best research provider are one business model with two scoreboards, and the second is cheap next to the first.

As this publication has argued, the launch machine has outrun the desks that quote the baskets behind complex products. Straus's product list — derivative-based strategies, single-stock ETFs, active multi-asset mandates and bespoke fixed income — is precisely the shelf where that constraint bites. A Canadian dealer collecting four quoting and research categories reads less as evidence the constraint has lifted than as quoting capacity concentrating in a handful of balance sheets while the number of filings keeps climbing. That leaves issuers with a worse problem than a thin idea pipeline, because an issuer can fix a bad product and cannot fix an illiquid one.

Five analysts fielding dozens of weekly requests generate a record of what Canadian wealth managers actually ask about, and Straus says the firm is putting new tools to work on that unstructured query data. The likely use is a demand sensor aimed at product development, reading what advisors want before an issuer files for it — and unlike headcount, such a record compounds with volume. A five-person team that scales through tooling behaves nothing like a five-person team that scales through hiring.

Viger's timeframe is the part competitors cannot buy back at speed: twenty years of technology and personnel spent assembling a franchise that spans four client types. The test is whether the query data starts producing public product calls ahead of the filings. If it does, the quoting trophies will look like the least interesting asset on the shelf.