GIC is one of the three investment entities in Singapore that manage Singapore’s reserves, along with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Temasek. GIC manages an estimated $1.18 trillion and is the fourth-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute.
The DESK recently met with Weimin Zhu, Head Fixed Income Trading (Americas) at GIC, at GIC’s New York City office to learn about his role, the functionality and capabilities of the trading desk, and trends shaping the marketplace.
What is your career background, up to the present day?
My career has evolved from a foundation in engineering and quantitative research into nearly two decades of fixed income trading experience.
I grew up in China, completed my undergraduate education there, and moved to the United States in the mid-1990s to pursue graduate studies. I earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and began my professional career in the U.S.
I spent seven years at Deutsche Bank, initially working on trading infrastructure. Driven by a strong interest in quantitative finance, I also completed a Master’s degree in Computational Finance at Carnegie Mellon University. This combination of technical and quantitative expertise eventually led me to join GIC as a Quant Strategist.
In 2010, GIC began building a fixed income trading desk, which marked a significant transition in my career from quantitative research into trading. Since then, I have spent nearly 17 years in fixed income trading.
How have fixed income markets evolved over the course of your career?
The market has evolved significantly over the past decade, and our role and responsibilities have expanded alongside it. When we started the centralized fixed income trading desk in 2010, separating it from portfolio management and research, our focus was limited to some relatively liquid asset classes such as rates, credit, and FX. Since then, we have broadened our coverage to include emerging markets, convertibles, mortgages, loans, and other asset classes. Today, we actively trade across seven to eight markets, covering a wide spectrum of products ranging from conventional cash bonds to complex derivatives and bespoke transactions.
The trading landscape has also undergone a profound transformation. Seventeen years ago, electronic trading, automation, algorithms, and portfolio trading were largely absent from fixed income and FX markets. Today, liquidity structures, execution venues, and trading technology are fundamentally different. In addition to leveraging external platforms, we have developed in-house electronic trading and automation capabilities, supported by a data-driven approach that has significantly enhanced both execution efficiency and trading outcomes.
Overall, market size has grown substantially, trade sizes have increased, and turnover in secondary markets has accelerated. At the same time, primary credit markets have become considerably more active, resulting in a much more intensive and dynamic trading environment than in previous years.
What is the profile of your trading desk?
In Americas FI trading, we have six to seven traders covering fixed income products, including full-time FI traders and a couple of cross-asset traders.
Our cross-asset group specializes in electronic trading and automation for high-ticket-volume, smaller-size trades. For larger fixed income trades, we still execute a significant portion by voice, as some products are not electronified and we need to carefully manage market footprint, information leakage, and counterparty relationships.
That said, electronification and automation have been a major priority for us over the years, and electronic trading now represents a steadily increasing share of our overall volume. We are also investing meaningfully in AI to explore how it can enhance decision-making, improve execution workflows, and support more efficient trading processes.
How would you characterize fixed income markets so far in 2026?
Fixed income has been the primary source of market volatility this year. Our trading desk’s primary role is execution, which depends heavily on market liquidity and intraday risk management. Both have been meaningfully affected this year by elevated day-to-day realized volatility and sharp price moves driven by inflation concerns, rising US Treasury yields, and substantial corporate debt issuance, particularly from hyperscalers and data centers.
These conditions also directly influence portfolio managers’ asset allocation and investment decisions. As markets move more rapidly, PMs tend to require more trading activity, which increases the complexity of execution across speed, quality, liquidity, and risk management.
What is one of your primary challenges, and how do you manage it?
GIC’s fixed income trading structure differs from many other real-money asset managers. In many buy-side organizations, traders tend to specialize by asset class, with rates traders supporting rates PMs, credit traders supporting credit PMs, and so on.
Our model is centralized: all traders cover the full fixed income spectrum rather than a single product area. At any given time, a trader may be active across six or seven products while also supporting portfolio managers globally across New York, London, and Singapore. This model has worked very well since its inception and offers several advantages. It has significantly improved execution and cost efficiency while allowing execution risks to be managed holistically. It also provides a consistent level of service to all internal stakeholders and enables firm-level investment decisions to be handled more effectively. The model gives our traders broad exposure and opportunities to trade across different products, helping them connect the dots, develop impactful market color, and make better execution decisions. It also enables us to manage counterparty relationships more holistically and effectively, strengthening partnerships and bringing additional resources to the firm.
However, this model also makes traders’ skill training, communication, and coordination across regions more challenging. As a result, hiring, training, and retaining the right talent are critical. We need to structure the team carefully, provide sustained training over several years, and give traders the right level of responsibility as they develop. I am very proud of the team we have built and the way they handle this demanding mandate.
What characteristics, skills, and experience do you look for in prospective new hires?
Curiosity and learning agility. The most important qualities I look for are intellectual curiosity and the ability to learn quickly.
I focus less on a candidate’s prior trading experience and more on whether they can grow within our model. Given the breadth of our desk, every new hire requires significant training and development to succeed across products, regions, and market conditions.
Technology skills are increasingly important, especially as markets and AI capabilities continue to evolve. Strong coding and data-analysis skills help us build more of our internal infrastructure and analytical frameworks, while also enabling traders to make better-informed decisions.
Beyond technical ability, traders need to stay composed under stress, perform effectively in fast-moving markets, make sound decisions under pressure, manage multiple priorities, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively across teams and regions.
Strong interpersonal skills are also essential, as we work closely with both internal stakeholders and external business partners. The ability to develop partnerships, both internally and externally, is very important in our roles.
What industry or internal innovations can improve liquidity sourcing and trading efficiency?
In the industry, there have been important advances – for example, portfolio trading in credit has grown significantly in recent years, while electronic trading platforms continue to expand their capabilities. Even so, parts of the fixed income and OTC derivatives markets remain less electronified, which means we still need efficient tools to bridge the gap between manual execution and automated workflows.
To address this, we developed an internal system to systematically process OMS orders and give traders a faster, more reliable way to inquire with dealers for OTC derivatives quotes. We have also enhanced dealer selection by integrating AI into the data-processing and decision-making workflow.
Additionally, through the use of AI tools, today we are able to turn a price and liquidity discovery task that previously took 10-15 minutes into a process that can be completed in seconds. This improves both trading efficiency and execution outcomes.
What market areas that are not really electronic now, do you think can be electronic in the not-so-distant future?
Certain markets remain complex. Options, for example, are a major area of complexity, including rate swaptions, CDX options, and FX options. For us, the challenge is not only platform functionality, but also seamless integration with our OMS. Electronification has also been slower in emerging market rates products, where settlement processes and system integration can make adoption more difficult, though significant progress is finally being made.
It is encouraging to see the industry, across both the buy side and sell side, investing significant effort to modernize these workflows. I remain optimistic about the future of electronic trading, while recognizing that human interaction and strong relationships will continue to play an important role in fixed income trading.
How does automation support best execution, both within internal workflows and in the broader marketplace?
Automation is an important part of best execution, but it needs to be designed and monitored carefully. The setup matters, because automation is most effective when the workflow is repeatable, liquid, and low-touch.
The technology exists, but it must be used selectively. Automation is well suited to repetitive workflows, while bespoke or situational trades require careful thought before engaging the street. In those cases, human judgment remains essential to balancing execution quality, liquidity, risk, and relationship considerations.
What are the challenges of being a large buy-side firm that needs to trade in size?
The key challenge for a large buy-side firm is moving risk in a timely fashion when market liquidity is not deep enough. In those situations, we need to manage market risk carefully while also limiting our market footprint and reducing the risk of information leakage.
The best way to address this is to develop long-term, high-trust partnerships with bank counterparties. This is an area where technology, electronic trading, and automation have limits. Strong relationships, built on trust and mutual understanding, remain a major focus for our desk.
Our relationships with banks and market makers are extremely important. Best execution is not only about achieving the best price on a single transaction, although price always matters. We also consider the broader relationship, including each counterparty’s strengths, weaknesses, and ability to support us across the full range of our needs. Our goal is to build strategic partnerships that work well for both sides over time.
Partnerships should be evaluated in a broader context, including research, new-issue allocation, liquidity provision, market color, and other services we receive from counterparties. While there can be tension between achieving the best price on an individual trade and preserving the value of a long-term relationship, being firm, fair, and transparent usually allows us to achieve the best overall outcome while meeting our best-execution responsibilities.
That is why I encourage junior traders to invest time in building relationships with our partners. The principle is simple: help them help you.
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