BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Data Analytics Tool—Trade Informatics

Trade Informatics (TI) takes home this year’s best buy-side data analytics tool, thanks to its broker-neutral systematic trading platform, Strategic & Tactical Analytic Research & Trading (Start) and its business intelligence software, Trading Analysis Program (Tap).  Allan Goldman, COO at TI, says demand for customized trading strategies from buy-side traders is growing, driven by the need for greater transparency and control of trading processes.

TI’s post-trade analytics tool helps buy-side firms align investment and trading strategies as well as seek out improved execution opportunities leveraging the firm’s Start platform across brokers’ direct market access routes and dark pools. The broker-neutral platform seeks to improve performance, manage costs, and allow control of and transparency into execution strategies to help clients seek alpha, minimize investment costs, and drive operational efficiencies. Through Tap and Start, TI’s clients are able to interrogate large volumes of data and identify insights. TI combines trade analysis, trade reporting, systematic trading and centralized workflow management with action-oriented consulting to measure costs, develop trading strategies, monitor results, and improve performance.  

Goldman says clients are looking to introduce efficiency, transparency, automation and optimization to front-office desks. “Execution quality beyond basic best-execution compliance requirements is a high priority for buy-side traders and TI is ideally situated to guide them toward this goal,” he says.

Using data from clients’ portfolio management systems, order management systems and execution management systems, TI combines all actions in the transaction relay from portfolio manager and buy-side trader to broker and venue. It then applies performance attribution and reporting functions to the entire execution process. TI, which has been researching and building AI tools to enhance the Start platform, is training its systems to provide enriched integration of real-time market data signals to support dynamic adjustments to execution trajectory, order horizon, and liquidity sourcing. In the next 12 months, the firm will release Tap4, its proprietary business intelligence and reporting utility that allows its analysts and clients to perform in-depth analysis on their datasets. Tap4 adds new standard benchmarking data points, swelling the total number of data points to 150. “Tap4 also includes Mifid II enhancements, venue-level markout (reversion) analysis and an infrastructure that will facilitate our migration to cloud-based data processing, allowing for unlimited elasticity of computing resources and uptime robustness,” Goldman explains. 

Meanwhile, TI’s Start platform has been rolled out to Europe in a limited release, although Goldman says TI should see broader production rollout in the first half of 2019.