BrokerTec
Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE)
Cboe U.S. Equity Options
Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT)
COMEX
Fenics
ICE Futures U.S.
Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX)
Montréal Exchange (MX)
New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX)
Nodal Exchange
1In development.
2Access provided via FIX bridge through CN First International Futures Limited.
3Access provided via FIX bridge through local brokers, including Samsung Futures.
Welcome back to the final installment in our summer series on women in tech, “Speaking in Code.” If you haven’t been following, check out the series introduction, our first Q&A with engineering manager Diana Dumitru and our second Q&A with software engineer Allison Schwarz.
Today we are profiling TT’s Jessica Duggins. Jessica began her career in the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) pit in the late 1990s after graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a degree in philosophy. As the trading industry grew more technical, so did her skills, and she joined TT in 2005 as an associate level tester. She has since worked her way through the test engineering department and now serves as the director.
What do you enjoy most about your job as Director of Software Quality Engineering (SQE)?
Jessica: I especially enjoy the managerial and team aspect of working with my SQE group, interfacing with the developers and figuring out how to solve problems. Software testing is a unique position. Traditional engineers tend to get the spotlight and the glory, but we’re their right-hand men and women. We have to take what they do, think about all the ways it can go wrong end-to-end, anticipate those things, test those things, debug issues and help solve problems.
All market participants have felt their margins tighten in the post-crisis regulatory squeeze. As the competition for liquidity from traditional providers has grown, agency algorithms have emerged as a remedy for the increasing inefficiencies and diminished liquidity in the fixed income markets. Not only do these sophisticated algos smartly work orders, but they also open the way for valuable transaction cost analysis.
Jonty Field, Head of EMEA, Quantitative Brokers |
Quantitative Brokers (QB) is a leading provider of algorithms to the futures and fixed income markets, which will soon be available on the TT platform. We sat down with Jonty Field, Head of EMEA, to better understand QB’s unique approach to agency algorithms and what they have to offer users on TT.
TT: Let’s start at the beginning. How did QB get started?
Jonty: QB was founded in 2008 during the financial crisis. Robert Almgren and Christian Hauff, both at a large sell side institution at the time, realized that fixed income traders were lacking the quantitative execution and cost measurement tools that were so valuable in equity markets. It would have been difficult to build these tools within a large bank, because the challenge of providing everything to everyone coupled with the requirement that it be distributed across different desks and regions, resulted in numerous, complex obstacles.
Today we’re continuing our summer blog series, “Speaking in Code,” which profiles some of the women here at Trading Technologies, focusing on the challenges and opportunities they’ve experienced in their careers in fintech. If you haven’t been following, I encourage you to read the introduction and the first spotlight featuring Diana Dumitru.
Our second profile features software engineer Allison Schwarz, who has been at Trading Technologies since May 2006. Allison joined TT right after graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in Computer Science and began her career writing tools in software quality engineering (SQE). She has worked on a variety of teams in her nine years at TT and is currently serving as a mobile developer.
It’s been just over one week since Global Markets Exchange (GMEX) debuted. Connectivity was available at launch through X_TRADER®, and in fact the first trade on GMEX was executed between two X_TRADER users. We’re planning to offer access through the next-generation TT platform later this year.
GMEX has launched Euro-denominated IRS constant maturity futures (CMF) in response to demand from end users. These demands arose from changes in the European derivatives markets that were introduced under the European Markets and Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and the European Commission’s review of the MiFID II. These futures, positioned as alternatives to OTC interest rate swaps, allow end users to benefit from the capital and margin efficiencies of futures, which are more favorable than the higher margin requirements for cleared swaps.
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Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Algorithmic Trading: The Play-at-Home Version” highlighting the growth of a new crop of DIY tools that allow retail traders to easily automate their trading strategies. The users quoted in the article expressed excitement about having the ability to quickly build and deploy their own strategies, but they lamented that unforeseen issues in their algorithms led to sizable losses.
Since 1994, TT has been building tools to allow professional derivatives traders to automate their strategies. It’s encouraging to see the DIY algo programming trend start to migrate to retail traders, but the potential for loss with some of these systems is a detriment. To that end, allow me to point out a few differences between our approach and the others.
Our ADL visual programming platform represented a major breakthrough in algorithmic trading when it was first brought to market in 2009. Using drag-and-drop actions to assemble building blocks, traders and programmers alike can rapidly design, test and deploy automated trading strategies without writing a single line of code. With ADL, users can generate executable strategies in hours to seize and act on fleeting market opportunities in timeframes that were difficult or even impossible to achieve previously.