Buy-Side Technology Awards 2015: Best Buy-Side Commodities Trading Platform—Bloomberg

However, when it comes to the Buy-Side Technology Awards category for the best commodities trading platform, it turns out that Bloomberg Tradebook, a subsidiary of the New York-based vendor, and its Futures ISV platform is the underdog: Trading Technologies’ X_Trader has long been the favorite in this category, having won it six times in the past eight years. This year, however, a new champion has been crowned, as Bloomberg Tradebook’s Futures ISV, a multi-broker platform, takes home the top prize. 

The platform provides customized trading workflows, proprietary algorithms and direct market access to over 40 global futures exchanges. Three new functions were added to the platform over the past year, as Bloomberg Tradebook made great strides to meet all its clients’ needs. 

Order stitching is the first upgrade. Many order management systems (OMSs) and execution management systems (EMSs) do not account for futures spread trades as a bundle. Users are therefore required to break up orders and re-enter them into their systems after they have been traded. Futures ISV allows clients to enter their entire legs into the platform. The solution then automatically stitches the order together and enables the client to trade the spread on the platform. Once completed, the order is sent back to the client’s OMS/EMS as separate legs. The entire process is then integrated into the client’s risk checks in the OMS/EMS.

The second upgrade is in the fixed-income cash area. While rates futures traders have been able to trade spreads on the platform for over 10 years, this year a fixed-income cash platform was launched with electronic connections to Nasdaq’s eSpeed and BrokerTec.

Finally, improvements have also been made to the custom index trading functionality. The Bloomberg terminal allows users to create custom indexes based on any data point available from Bloomberg, allowing them to create custom trade strategies and order triggers. Futures ISV allows users to connect their custom indexes directly to a futures and fixed-income trading platform, providing them with the ability to use multi-leg strategies for commodities, rates, energy and equity index-futures trades.

The platform provides customized trading workflows, proprietary algorithms and direct market access to over 40 global futures exchanges. Three new functions were added to the platform over the past year, as Bloomberg Tradebook made great strides to meet all its clients’ needs.