Waters Rankings 2016: Best Agency Broker — Bloomberg Tradebook

Glenn Lesko, CEO of Bloomberg Tradebook, says buy-side clients are looking for help when it comes to reducing market complexity and figuring out ways to achieve best execution and sourcing liquidity-universal challenges for buy-side firms. "This encourages Tradebook to pursue a strategy of providing value-added products that build upon and integrate into existing solutions," he says.

Earlier this year, the broker added an in-trade function for its Strategy Analyzer (STAZ) offering, allowing traders to change strategies in real time based on Bloomberg’s data and analytics, and Tradebook’s embedded proprietary predictive models.

The solution normalizes all of the data made available to traders and offers it to them in real time. This way, traders are able to track the performance of orders on seven types of execution: bid, mid, ask, open auction, closing auction, in blocks, and in the dark. STAZ leverages trading data from multiple functions and predictive models to simplify communication and aggregate data for actionable trading. Separate from STAZ, the broker also added a portfolio arrival-price algorithm that utilizes Bloomberg's global Port factor model, and brings transparency to traders and portfolio managers. 

The firm has also been busy expanding its presence in Asia. After launching its exchange-traded fund (ETF) request-for-quote (RFQ) platform in the US and Europe, the firm built out and launched functionality specifically for the Asian markets. The Bloomberg ETF RFQ platform has seen the strongest growth coming from fixed-income, international and commodity ETFs. Overall, Bloomberg Tradebook has seen ETF block volumes triple in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same time last year.

For example, in the first quarter of 2016, the fixed-income ETF volume on the platform was six-fold that of the first quarter of 2015. As of May, 30 percent of the flow on the platform is fixed-income ETFs, according to Lesko. He adds that commodity ETF volume in the first quarter of 2016 was 20 times that of the corresponding quarter in 2015.

The solution normalizes all of the data made available to traders and offers it to them in real time. This way, traders are able to track the performance of orders on seven types of execution: bid, mid, ask, open auction, closing auction, in blocks, and in the dark.

“Our RFQ for ETFs and BPool provide an electronic workflow for anonymous aggregation of unique liquidity, while One-sided Pair is a result of demand to capture the increased correlation among asset prices and our ability to access multiple sources of data,” Lesko says.