Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Buy-Side Algorithmic/DMA Product or Service—FlexTrade

In 2012 it was ConvergEx taking home the title in this category, followed by Deltix (2013), FlexTrade (2014) and Dash Financial (2015). Well, apparently some normalcy has returned, although not from the broker community: FlexTrade has made it two wins in three years, thanks to its FlexTrader offering.

FlexTrader is the vendor’s broker-neutral, fully customizable, algorithmic trading workstation for global equities, foreign exchange (FX), options and futures. The vendor offers an open architecture that can be integrated with most systems, and employs multi-asset direct market access (DMA) along with an array of trading strategy templates.

This year has seen a number of notable enhancements made to the FlexTrader platform. In September, the vendor introduced TradeGuide to the platform as a trade data visualization tool. According to FlexTrade, TradeGuide is a series of pre-defined web components sitting directly in the FlexTrader multi-asset execution management system (EMS), offering buy-side users with pre-trade and in-trade feedback on orders.

“TradeGuide draws in data from multiple sources, which is interpreted with conclusions presented in an easy-to-digest format. Rather than relying on the traditional row and column table format, TradeGuide introduces a completely new way of visualizing trade data,” according to the company. It can also answer questions, such as: “What’s the best way to route this order?” or “How big is my footprint?” where it will provide a suggestion using analyses of historical trade data.

In May, FlexTrade partnered with RSRCHXchange in order to provide buy-side traders with immediate alerts about the availability of relevant research via FlexTrader. And in February, FlexTrade joined the growing list of vendors that have partnered with communication systems provider Symphony. Through the pairing, FlexTrader and the Symphony platform are integrated so as to provide secure and compliant messaging directly into the trading blotter for any FlexTrade clients using the messaging provider.

FlexTrade offers an open architecture that can be integrated with most systems, and employs multi-asset direct market access along with an array of trading strategy templates.

Heading into 2017 and beyond, FlexTrade will look to help firms adhere to new mandates stemming from Mifid II, specifically for investment research unbundling rules and the need to provide deeper transaction-cost analysis (TCA) to help with the regime’s best execution requirements.