BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side algorithmic/DMA product or service—Dash Financial Technologies

For the second year in a row, Dash Financial has emerged top in the best buy-side algorithmic/DMA product or service category in the annual BST Awards, thanks to its Dash Sensor suite. The offering is a multi-asset routing solution that is fully customizable to each client’s algorithmic strategies, and supports benchmark and liquidity capture for US options and equities. The premise of the suite is to allow traders to control the behavior of their orders once they are executed, especially where they are routed.

Chicago-based Dash recently released a dark liquidity aggregation algorithm that provides traders with transparency, performance and control when they route orders to off-exchange liquidity pools. Called Sensor Dark, it is part of Dash’s larger Sensor suite and is designed to source dark liquidity from independent venues, broker pools and hidden exchange liquidity pools across the US equities markets. Users are still able to customize these algorithms to meet their specific strategies and they can be connected to Dash’s visualization and analytics platform, Dash 360.

Dash places great importance on customizability, ensuring that its clients can tailor the algorithms and strategies within Sensor so that they reflect their specific needs. Users can fine-tune their strategies to cover specific firms, traders or even securities. To measure the impact of the change in the algorithm, Sensor can be connected to the Dash360 platform. Changes to algorithms can also be made in real-time, something Dash claims most other platforms cannot support, given that they typically need to wait at least overnight in order to do so.

Part of Dash’s service is to leverage its expertise for clients who might want more guidance when it to comes to the creation of their algorithms within the Sensor system, although ultimately clients decide how to customize their strategies. The company has also been adding new features to all of the platforms it offers, not just the Sensor Suite, but also to the Dash 360 platform.