If you’ve been following TT recently, you know 2014 is already shaping up to be a year of significant change. In the past two months alone, we’ve:
- Welcomed a new CEO, Rick Lane
- Launched a new brand identity
- Revealed the next-gen TT platform, a streamlined, go-anywhere trading ecosystem that should be in full production by year’s end
This week we reached another significant milestone, the unveiling of our newly renovated Chicago headquarters.
One of the primary objectives of this renovation was to create a space where our team could engage, collaborate and freely exchange ideas—an environment where our talent feels empowered and willing to take risks. We know that inspiring our people to be at their best is the most surefire way for TT to deliver compelling solutions for our customers.
A great deal of thought and effort went into planning this exceptional facility. In fact, I think it’s more impressive than many of the spaces developed by other tech companies in Chicago.
What’s equally impressive is that we kept out-of-pocket costs to a minimum by doing the renovation in conjunction with our recent lease renewal. As a TT shareholder, this is my favorite part!
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| Pictures from the internal event celebrating the unveiling of our newly renovated space. |
The dramatic two-story, multi-purpose space serves as kitchen, lounge, game room, meeting space and…wait for it…bar, with a constantly changing selection of six craft beers plus two wines on tap.
The bar is particularly noteworthy. It’s constructed entirely of reclaimed materials, including wood from a grain elevator built in 1887. At the time it was completed in Duluth, MN, it was the largest grain elevator in the world. It stood intact until about ten years ago, when crews began to deconstruct and salvage the wood. I think it’s pretty special that purely by chance, we stumbled across materials that are historically significant to our industry and ended up incorporating them in the structure of our bar, which is where I’m sure many new ideas for our industry will be born and nurtured.
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Tags: Trade Execution
As part of writing this blog describing TT’s new order passing functionality, I went to the Internet, curious to see how the trusty Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “pass.”
Not surprisingly, most of the definitions are unrelated to passing an order, and you have to go all the way down to the seventh entry to find a definition that even closely aligns with the trading world:
“Pass: (7) to go from the control, ownership, or possession of one person or group to that of another <the throne passed to the king’s son>…”
While passing an order to another user or execution desk does involve the concepts of ownership and control, for complete accuracy I have to admit (with tongue in cheek) that order passing is just slightly different from the succession process in a monarchy.
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Tags: Trade Execution
I was amused by the recent flurry of media releases proclaiming the adoption of algorithmic trading in derivatives markets. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, could this be important new information that somehow leads us to enlightened trading? Or is it the case there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact? The latter are the words of one well-known sleuth, whose Watson would likely retort, “No kidding, Sherlock,” or something roughly comparable.
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| The infamous Sherlock Holmes |
Avoiding the temptation to offer my own breaking insights, such as The Internet is here to stay! and Mobile communications expected to take off!, I will instead stay the high road, eschewing mirthful gratification for the sake of propriety. As our sleuth would advise, if you eliminate all other factors, the one which remains must be the truth: while other vendors are merely talking about algo trading in derivatives, Trading Technologies has been delivering for several years. I am therefore tickled pink that other vendors are now “discovering” this space. The algos are not missing, they are here. In production. Today.
One of TT’s first algorithmic solutions was our hosted Autospreader® Strategy Engine (SE), which is a very-low-latency computational server for executing synthetic spread algorithms such as calendar rolls, synthetic strips, butterflies and condors. Recent enhancements to this system include intuitive rule building for customized handling of pre- and post-trade hedging, as well as conditional participation and synthetic sniper spreads.
The Autospreader SE product is complemented by TT’s Synthetic Strategy Engine, another proximity-hosted server that provides a suite of algorithmic order types, including synthetic icebergs, TWAP, POV and triggered algos such as stops and if-touched orders.
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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading, APIs, Trade Execution
One of the most interesting aspects of supporting a product like TT’s Autospreader® is the fact that users continue to find new ways to use it, especially as market conditions change. While it would be impossible for me to talk about the countless number of unique strategies that are created for specific markets, I can give you a good idea of how Autospreader can be applied by looking at how it’s used to execute some common arbitrage spreads.
My intention is not to portray these strategies as potential sources of profit, but to portray them as stepping stones to further innovation. I hope that these examples will “get your wheels turning.” Even if you’re already familiar with these spreads, this blog can serve as a good review of Autospreader.
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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading
“Nobody reads the manual” is a common refrain when discussing documentation. For software, many users simply open the program, fumble around and begin using the application without looking at a setup guide or pressing F1 for help. And many users who search for a “getting started guide” are confronted with a vast repository of .pdf files, requiring a best guess at which tome contains the nugget of information they need. With mobile and desktop applications increasing in usability, the dusty old users’ manual seems more like a bygone artifact of antiquity than a required, helpful aid.
Which explains, in part, why TT abandoned user manuals.
Everything from our system administration and user manuals to our setup and getting started guides has been opened to the internet via the new Help Library. This allows a user to open the browser, enter a search term and quickly find the information they need. Want to find out howX_TRADER supports NYMEX products? Or simply how to collect logfiles in TT User Setup? You can now access all TT content in less than a second—without searching a 200+ page document.
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