BST Awards 2020: Best buy-Side TCA tool—Dash Financial

As of last year, a Greenwich Associates study found that 88% of buy-side equities traders were using transaction-cost analysis compared to 68% of traders in foreign exchange and 38% in fixed-income desks. At the time, the firm predicted that TCA would become more important and ingrained in the trading process. As TCA becomes a larger focus area firms, perhaps that’s why Dash Financial is this year’s provider for best TCA tool, ending a three-year streak held by Tradeweb Markets.

“Transparency has always been a challenge for the industry. There is a tremendous amount of new data being captured, therefore it’s critical that our clients have the analytics, reporting and visualization tools that allow them to cut through the noise by presenting clear, concise and actionable intelligence,” says Eugene Kearns, Dash managing director.

The winning product, Dash360, allows clients to see in real-time how their orders are routed, including performance, cost breakdowns, and comprehensive data visualizations that bring the routing and execution processes to life, Kearns adds.

In February, Dash released a new suite of analytics and reporting tools aimed at portfolio traders. The suite features venue and routing analysis, corporate action and earnings calendars, and industry/market cap/liquidity analytics, among other capabilities.

Dash360 is available as a web-delivered platform developed in HTML5, making it suitable for any device—now a necessary feature in the era of large-scale remote working.

“We have the ability to customize our technology and create a unique trading experience to fit the needs of each client. The tools needed by a broker-dealer might not be the same as those needed by a hedge fund, so we provide our clients a flexible architecture that allows for detailed customization of any thesis, style or workflow. When we sit down with a new client our goal is to improve performance, provide unmatched transparency and in many cases streamline workflows to help lower costs,” Kearns says.