Waters Rankings 2019: Best Execution Management System: Bloomberg

The Bloomberg Terminal is arguably the most well-known piece of hardware on Wall Street. It’s the Terminal’s ability to manage trade execution, and the data analytics it provides, that make it so valuable, and why it is this year’s winner of the best execution management system (EMS) award.

Traders around the globe use Bloomberg to manage their orders across all asset classes, whether it’s fixed income and derivatives through the TSOX EMS, or equities using the execution management system known as EMSX, or foreign exchange using FXEM.

Nicolas Bean, head of electronic trading solutions at Bloomberg, says the company has been working toward a more seamless trading experience across all asset classes, making it easier for clients to implement their cross-asset strategies using a single interface.

“We are also developing tools such as watch lists aimed at helping our clients maximize Bloomberg’s high-quality data and analytics for trade idea generation and order creation,” he says. “In addition, our transaction-cost analysis solution, BTCA, delivers pre-trade intelligence to traders to improve their execution, while supporting their best execution and reporting requirements, post-trade. We connect the dots between each of these parts of the trading process and the Bloomberg solutions used by clients, so we are streamlining trade idea generation, execution and post-trade services in one place.”

Bloomberg is also working to combine “the growing amount of data generated through electronic trading with novel machine-learning techniques to develop decision support models that can be used by execution desks to implement their orders,” Bean says.

And data is the all-powerful being in today’s capital markets, as the thirst for new and more data is growing rapidly. So as you might expect, the company is also expanding its alternative data universe. “In execution management, we are both consumers and generators of alternative data,” says Bean.