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The Chicago summer is in the back nine, but golf season is still in full swing. After all the strokes were tallied at the Trading Technologies golf outing at Chicago’s own Ridgemoor Country Club, I had the privilege of sitting down over a pint at the 19th hole with industry veteran Carl Gilmore, co-head of futures for Wedbush Futures.
We had a lot to discuss as the futures division of Wedbush is not quite a year old and recently made the new TT trading platform available to their clients. And while we debated the likes of Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth and forecasted the future of Tiger, we also talked a little business and exchanged perspectives on the markets.
I summarized our conversation for this blog post. It’s a great opportunity for Trade Talk readers to learn a bit more about Wedbush Futures, garner insights about the current low interest rate environment and understand why Wedbush chose to be an early adopter of our new platform.
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| TT’s Robbie McDonnell (L) with Wedbush’s Carl Gilmore (R) at the recent Trading Technologies golf outing. |
Tags: Trade Execution
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.
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| 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.
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Tags: Trade Execution
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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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading, Trade Execution
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.
ADL® (Algo Design Lab)
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.
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| With ADL, users drag and drop blocks containing pre-tested code onto a canvas to create automated trading programs. |
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Tags: Algos & Spread Trading, Trade Execution
Our Trade Talk blog has covered many diverse topics in recent weeks. But today it’s time to squeeze in a few words on new product functionality.
The primary focus of our new TT platform is simple: provide the best trading experience available anywhere. That’s an easy statement to make and sounds really nice, but it typically makes users roll their eyes. Why? Because delivering on that goal is extremely difficult.
But what about me?
As a trading system vendor, we deliver a set of functionality designed to meet the demands of a broad-based set of users, sometimes with very different needs. But there’s a dilemma in that product delivery model because the process of trading—and trading well—is a very personal endeavor. You want trading software that is customized to *your* style, not a bland, generic, cookie-cutter set of windows.
So how do we address that desire for custom-tailored software and be able to deliver it within a practical framework of commonly used functionality? Well, tucked within our new front end is a hidden gem called widget groups. The “secret” code to unlock this feature is easy to remember: “Control. Shift. Drag.” It’s that simple, but the end result is very effective.
Tags: Trade Execution
