SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Automated Trading Platform—FlexTrade Systems

FlexTrade Systems—thanks to its FlexTRADER execution management system (EMS)—has won the best sell-side automated trading platform at this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards. This marks the second year in a row that FlexTrade has won this award, and its third time overall, as it took home the trophy in 2013.

Over the last 12 months, the vendor has been busy partnering with other third-party providers to deliver new solutions to clients. It has integrated Kensho’s actionable intelligence into the FlexTRADER EMS. It has also integrated BestX Trade Analytics into FlexTRADER. And, of course, FlexTrade won this year’s best partnership or alliance award thanks to its work with Dataminr, where it created a global macro news alert feed that pulls in Dataminr’s Twitter news.

Additionally, about a year ago, FlexTrade introduced the FlexAlgoWheel, the company’s next generation, data-driven interface for algo selection that incorporates real-time internal and external inputs, as well as transaction-cost analysis (TCA) to optimize the broker and algo selection process. “All of our recent enhancements are essentially meant to provide better/increased analytics/intelligence to assist a trader’s decision-making process when executing a trade,” says a spokesperson for the company. 

The EMS allows for trading in equities, foreign exchange (FX), equity options, futures and fixed-income products. It provides out-of-the-box cross-asset trading strategies that can then be customized to a company’s needs. It is connected to over 200 trading venues, including more than 20 dark pools. 

One of its key features is the EMS’ ability to control multiple portfolios comprising several sub-accounts over numerous global destinations from one trade blotter. And as clients are increasingly clamoring for better analytics capabilities, the platform provides pre-trade, real-time and post-trade analytics, as well as predictive analytics and risk and cost-optimized portfolio trade scheduling. 

FlexTRADER also has an order management component that allows for risk and position monitoring, full audit capabilities, and streamlined compliance reporting, market-making and principal trading. 

Previous winners in this category include SmartTrade Technologies and SunGard, now owned by FIS.