Transaction cost analysis – Joel Clark reports that currently only equities are meaningfully supported by the handful of technology vendors active in this space, although TCA support for fixed-income instruments is just around the corner.

Like most other areas in the world of financial IT, TCA technology is evolving at a rapid rate. The concept of monitoring and reporting the implicit and explicit costs of trading is not new to the buy side, but advances have been made from systems that produce static quarterly reports to far more timely analysis. With the increasing pressure for best execution – coming from clients as well as regulators – the majority of buy-side firms are using some form of TCA to prove best execution. Some are