Trade Talk Blog

The official blog of Trading Technologies, your source for professional futures trading software.

By way of introduction, my role at TT has involved me in a number of strategic initiatives including proximity trading, synthetic orders, Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Most recently I’ve been holding discussions with a variety of firms to further enhance the capabilities of our system for buy-side traders and portfolio managers. In this role, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with some key players in the buy-side community.

Of course, the term “buy side” itself refers to a fairly wide swath of business models, ranging from asset managers to hedge funds. But despite the breadth of the buy side as a whole, a growing number of buy-side users is demanding the option of a high-touch capability in a world otherwise driven toward low-latency, low-touch trading.

All the World’s a Stage

Staged Orders in X_TRADER®

Order staging, which involves the creation of staged or “care” orders, is in some ways an idea that’s as old as agency trading itself. Although they weren’t called care orders at first, care orders started as a voice call to a sell-side trader over telephones and squawk boxes. As technology marched forward, the vehicles for submitting care orders evolved to include faxes, followed by emails and instant messages.

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Every time I meet with customers I ask them the same question: “Why do you use X_TRADER?” Some sample responses:

“Because of your spreader.”
“It’s the most reliable system I’ve ever used.”
“Your automated trading is second to none.”
“You do spread charts the right way.”
“It’s flexible. I can configure it the way I like.”

This is a biased sample, of course, since the traders I ask are already using X_TRADER. But the answers are revealing. And there is a strong underlying theme to the replies.They use X_TRADER every day for one simple reason: Because it is very good at what it is supposed to do.

Forgive me if this sounds like boasting, but, hey, I’m just reporting what I hear as the X_TRADER product manager. And after all, this is a TT-sponsored product blog. 🙂
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Today marks the debut of Trading Technologies’ official corporate blog, Trade
Talk. On behalf of my colleagues, I’m excited to have another way to
communicate with our global community of customers, partners, employees and
others who have taken an interest in TT.

Who You’ll “Meet” Here

All of our product managers will write for Trade Talk. They are the folks who
lead the evolution of our product line on a day-to-day basis. They know our
software and the markets we serve inside and out, and they’ll provide our
readers with interesting content and commentary regarding a broad swath of
topics. We think you’ll enjoy hearing from them.

What You Can Expect to Find

We’ll write regularly about TT’s software, of course. We’ll offer “tips and
tricks,” introduce new features and products, explore existing capabilities and
present interesting use cases to help our customers best leverage our platform.

But we also plan to elevate the discussion beyond TT-centric topics and examine
key issues facing our industry. If something important happens in our world,
you might find us offering an analysis or opinion here.

Given that the range of topics we plan to discuss is wide-ranging, we hope
Trade Talk will become a place you’ll visit regularly for provocative content,
even if you’re not a TT customer—or, for that matter, not a trader. That
said…
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