Articles Marketmedia

Trading Platforms Pool Resources

Written by Terry Flanagan | May 29, 2014 8:20:15 PM

With equity markets undergoing massive fragmentation, trading platform providers are pooling their resources to provide traders with real-time data and access to the broadest liquidity.

“It's becoming more and more difficult for buy side traders to find liquidity in today’s fragmented equities market,” said Rob Hegarty, global head of equities at Thomson Reuters. “What we're really doing is streamlining their workflow, where we're providing information on liquidity, information on individual stocks, and allowing them to take action on those particular stocks very easily in one place.”

Thomson Reuters has integrated FlexTrade’s Execution Management System Spark into its desktop Eikon, as well as Indications of Interest from Thomson Reuters' Autex.

Vijay Kedia, president and CEO of FlexTrade, said in a statement, “By integrating a best-of-breed application such as FlexTrade Spark EMS in Eikon, we are streamlining the trader’s workflow and making their job easier and more efficient.”

The objective of these partnerships is to enable traders to gain access to equities and futures trade execution capabilities and send orders to multiple brokers and venues, including dark pools and ATS/MTFs, while at the same time benefiting from an aggregate view of liquidity, tools to monitor market events, and the ability to receive news, price and volume alerts to better inform trading strategies.

“We're using innovative ways to bring trade execution to the buy side and the sell side through Eikon,” Hegarty said. “By integrating Autex IOI data into Eikon, we’re making it easier for our customers to find liquidity. In addition, we’re integrating FlexTrade’s EMS to make it easier for our customers to execute trades right from their desktop.”

Thomson Reuters intends to connect and power the global financial community by providing buy-side customers with seamless access to broker-neutral EMS capabilities, as well as tools to better monitor broker activity and liquidity, Hegarty said.

Autex Trade Route is Thomson Reuters’ FIX order routing network which delivers order flow of two billion shares per day in equities, options and futures as well as FX and fixed income. “The Autex order indication and advertised trade service provides our customers with access to 750 buy-side firms and 700 executing brokers and venues,” said Hegarty. “We're taking all of our Autex and partner OMS and EMS capabilities and integrating them into Eikon.”

Featured image via NAN/Dollar Photo Club