Christopher Hughes is a Senior Equity Trader at Royal London Asset Management (RLAM), where he has been trading equities since 2004. Hughes has witnessed the evolution of the trading desk firsthand, having joined in 2004 when it was a two-person operation. He emphasizes the importance of in-house data capabilities to gain an edge in the current trading environment and is actively involved in building pre-trade analysis tools and market impact models to reduce reliance on broker-provided data. Hughes is a proponent of bilateral trading, engaging indirectly with liquidity providers via anonymous streams of liquidity.. He views this approach as additive to traditional broking methods, with the belief that the rise of electronic liquidity providers has significantly changed the liquidity dynamics in the market.