A new industry briefing from A-Team Group and CFN Services
In 2010, financial markets participants will continue to expand their trading activities as liquidity increasingly becomes fragmented, seeking alpha in new markets, best execution in dark pools, arbitrage opportunities across the order book and by implementing high frequency and complex, multi-leg, cross asset class strategies.
The successful operations – whether they be the proprietary desks of traditional broker/dealers, specialist high frequency and algorithmic traders, or quantitative hedge funds – will leverage a trading infrastructure that combines high performance analytical, algorithmic and order routing platforms with the lowest latency access to multiple, geographically dispersed execution venues.
Market infrastructure is evolving at a pace that even the most technology-savvy financial institutions find challenging. New execution venues are popping up everywhere fragmenting liquidity and creating cross-dependencies between primary and derivative marketplaces. The move to fast markets and trading automation is cutting response times and increasing data volumes. Markets have shown a 70% increase in volume over the last year alone.
In today’s financial markets, trading firms face constant pressures in a fiercely competitive environment. Providing best execution and superlative customer service is fundamental to attracting order flow. Running trading operations efficiently is also an imperative, to minimise costs internally and to offer best value to customers. Despite the increase in recent years of automated and algorithmic trading, the human touch is as important as ever in financial trading. Traders bring a wealth of experience to the art of trading, even when it is driven by computer-generated indicators. Their experience and relationships are vital to seeking out liquidity and efficient execution.
Download new 8-page briefing from the GoldenSource and
As financial institutions fight to survive in the post credit crunch climate, they are reviewing the serious challenges they face as they come to grips with new priorities in risk management across the enterprise. No longer just a middle office function, risk management is becoming the heart of financial institutions, driving business practices and governing the future direction of the industry.
An exponential expansion of market data volumes in recent years has been caused by the confluence of a number of technology and business drivers – from the emergence of electronic communication networks (ECNs) to the advent of smart order routing systems and algorithmic trading engines. Coupled with the increasingly divergent data sets needed to support complex decision systems, there is now a requirement for high performance data management infrastructures throughout the enterprise supporting high frequency automated trading as well as traditional market data processing functions like securities master file updates, risk analysis, and back-office trade support.
