BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Commodities Trading Platform—Neovest

Orem, Utah-headquartered Neovest takes home the title for the best buy-side commodities trading platform from this year’s BST Awards, thanks to its array of commodities trading applications. Its suite of tools are futures commission merchant-neutral and provide single-click execution on worked (care) orders, direct market access and algorithmic trading routes. On top of that, Neovest provides intra-day allocation and clearing reporting to sell-side merchants on behalf of its buy-side clients. This helps support their daily margin requirements. 

According to the company, its “secret sauce” has been continuously releasing new tools to streamline the complexities of trading unique to commodities as an asset class. It has signed up 45 new clients since June 2017 and tracks more than 3,100 active logins per day. 

In the last year, it released specialized execution and monitoring tools to support trading on the London Metal Exchange (LME), featuring single-click order execution functionality with LME market data and contract-date calendars. Using Neovest, clients can create unique LME order tickets and manage those orders efficiently, and on-demand. “From the LME market data, we incorporate their calendar schedules for one-day, cash, three-month, single, and third-Wednesday contracts in both outrights and calendar spreads,” Neovest officials say. 

Neovest’s LME monitor systematizes metals, contract types, and expiry dates in a structure that updates as expiries and rolls occur. Apart from this, its calendar-spread matrix module provides commodity traders with a view into top-of-book and depth-of-book data to monitor exchange-supported calendar spreads on all exchanges. Neovest has connectivity to 44 futures exchanges and therefore has access to market data from all those exchanges.

“This unique matrix provides spread pricing and depth at each contract intersection for both spread-exchange pricing and outright contract implied pricing. We’ve again integrated our single-click trade technology in the matrix for calendar spreads and out-rights to lift bids/offers, and launch tickets and depth,” the company says.

Meanwhile, the firm’s inter-commodity spreading utility incorporates its exchange data. This provides traders with tools to create and price spread trades for arbitrage opportunities across commodities and exchanges. It has integrated brokers’ inter-commodity spread algorithms in the module for buy-side clients, which allows them to route legs, a strategy where traders combine multiple options or futures contracts to hedge a position, arbitrage, or profit from a spread. This allows clients to better manage leg risk, the risk of not being able to fulfil a particular leg of a strategy at the price required, as well as price risk.