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.