Sourcing liquidity is the main problem facing equities traders despite their access to liquidity having improved over the past year, a new report has concluded.

Some 27.9% of respondents to JP Morgan’s 2021 Equities Execution Survey said that liquidity availability was their main challenge, ahead of regulatory changes (16.4%) and the imposition of best execution requirements (12.3%).

Other challenges were workflow efficiency, remote working, price transparency, availability of data and cost of data.

The scarcity of liquidity was the key challenge despite more traders saying their access to liquidity had improved in the last 12 months.

Some 38.5% of respondents said their access to liquidity had increased versus 20.5% who said their access to liquidity had decreased while the majority of traders (41%) said they had seen no change.

The report also found that 29.5% of respondents said their use of high touch blocks had increased over the past year in contrast to 13.9% who said they were trading fewer blocks.

Another theme highlighted by the survey is the prevalence of central risk books. Only 11% of respondents said they had not interacted with a central risk book while this number was lowest in Europe, the Middle East and Africa where only 4.5% said they had not used a central book.

Most respondents (42.1%) said they had interacted directly with a central risk ledger while 41.3% of respondents were using multiple brokers and 30.6% were accessing central risk books via algorithms.

Reflecting on the impact of the pandemic, 84.2% of traders said they had worked from home between March and June 2020. Some 42.2% said the pandemic had not changed how they trade but 28.1% said they had increased their use of high-touch execution methods and 21.9% said they were doing more program trading.

Equities clearing house DTCC is lobbying the US authorities to introduce next day equities settlement, claiming that T+1 would reduce market volatility by 41%.