Waters Rankings 2014: Best Transaction-Cost Analysis System Provider — ITG

Transaction-cost analysis is the study of “slippage”—the financial costs impacting traders (and by extension, the buy-side clients they represent), including commissions, taxes, settlement costs, timing delays, market impact and opportunity costs. ITG’s TCA platform is part of the firm’s ITG Trading Analytics suite comprising a pair of applications—ITG TCA Equities and ITG TCA FX—that sit alongside the firm’s ITG Smart Trading Analytics and ITG Alpha Capture Reporting tools, which, when viewed as a quartet, is hard to beat in terms of breadth and depth of functionality. The suite supports TCA calculations across both equities and foreign exchange (FX), providing users with current and historical data, placing them in the ideal position to make informed decisions with respect to strategy, which broker to send specific orders to, which algorithm to employ, and which liquidity pool to tap.

ITG TCA Equities helps firms optimize their trading strategies by providing them with feedback that they can use to adjust algorithmic strategies and trading tactics. It incorporates the firm’s proprietary Agency Cost Estimator model to identify and monitor implicit trading costs, along with spread and price impact, and supports the generation of reports with respect to compliance and performance by trading destination and broker. ITG TCA FX, introduced in mid-2010, is the manifestation of an alliance between ITG and institutional foreign-exchange trading platform FXall, and, as its name suggests, evaluates foreign-exchange transaction costs, and allows clients to validate the impact of different FX trading strategies with benchmark data supplied by FXall.