Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Commodities Trading Platform—Trading Technologies X_TRADER

Commodities trading, still a relatively niche area from a buy-side perspective compared to the traditional strongholds of equities and fixed income, tends to offer buy-side firms significantly greater volatility—and therefore the potential for greater yields—than other asset classes. Chicago-based Trading Technologies, an independent software vendor that sells its trading front-end to brokers as opposed to directly to the buy side, has an impressive number of distribution agreements with more than 100 firms, including 17 of the top 20 US futures brokers. It is, however, not a commodities-trading technology provider per se—its X_TRADER platform is widely used to support multi-asset trading, which underscores its versatility and the broadness of its product coverage.

However, X_TRADER, the latest version of which is 7.9, has become synonymous with commodities trading over the years, through a blend of user friendliness and flexibility, supporting in the region of 10,000 contracts from 40 exchanges across a range of asset classes, including futures, options on futures, cleared and over-the-counter (OTC) energies, all executable from a single front-end. X_TRADER allows users to simultaneously trade multiple markets from a single screen—no “swivel chair” scenarios here. It supports single-click order execution through MD Trader, the firm’s patented ladder-trading tool that features one-click order entry and cancellation. For spreading, TT’s Autospreader allows traders to define, manage and execute synthetic spread trades—whether spreading inter-exchange or intra-exchange products, Autospreader facilitates rapid creation and execution of synthetic spreads simultaneously. Traders can also use Autotrader’s Microsoft Excel-like commands and user interface to build and deploy customized strategies that capture immediate market opportunities, a feature that figured prominently with our judging panel.

Another significant application imbedded within the X_TRADER platform is ADL (Algo Design Lab), a visual programming platform that allows users to program strategies in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. This trader-intuitive method dramatically decreases the time necessary to write a program, a feature Trading Technologies says will allow “almost anyone” to build and implement programs with a minimum of fuss. This is TT’s third win in this category in the last three years. —VBA