Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Buy-Side Commodities Trading Platform/Service─Trading Technologies

But for firms trading the 10,000 products from more than three dozen exchanges available on X_Trader 7.11, the big story these days is Algo Design Lab (ADL). Launched in March of 2012, ADL's visual programming platform has already become the centerpiece of the toolkit. ADL allows programmers and non-programmers alike to design and deploy algorithms using drag-and-drop blocks instead of writing code. The application writes the code for you, reducing time-to-market of new execution strategies and eliminating syntax errors.

Tom Haldes, head of buy-side technology at Trading Technologies, says in-house programmers are migrating from traditional programming language strategy development through application program interfaces (APIs) to ADL. But the biggest winners are buy-side traders who have good ideas but no first-hand knowledge of how to write them in C++. Now they can trade energy, agriculture, metals, and softs-sugar, cocoa, coffee, wheat and fruit-through ADL with confidence that mistakes will be pointed out by visual warnings.

"At TT, we feel the highest and best use of a trader's time is in developing specific business logic for realizing fleeting trading opportunities," Haldes explains. "This means that we also believe that if a trader spends a great deal of time thinking about error handling or exception management in a trading application, then potential opportunities are being lost. ADL factors out many mundane programming chores unrelated to business logic or market strategy."

Among the other features of version 7.11 are enhancements to the Synthetic Strategy Engine, which supports the creation of synthetic order types. They include with-a-tick order types, support for time- and volume-duration orders, and the ability to preview per-slice order quantities that are to be executed on a randomized slicer. The latest version of X_Trader supports Brazil's BM&FBovespa, and has added the Hedge Manager Rule Builder for specifying custom behavior for hedge orders on Autospreader, the synthetic spread-trading tool. Look out for support for interest-rate swap futures venue Eris Exchange in the near future.