As market structure changes brought on by MiFID and Reg NMS continue to drive up the amount of market data, brokers and hedge funds can stay competitive by leveraging CEP technology to keep pace. There are few platforms available to provide the speed necessary to process high frequency trading along with the ability to store up to 20 years of tick data across every asset class. The need to scan the market on a tick-by-tick basis is crucial for most algorithmic trading strategies. Many tier-2 & 3 brokers are losing institutional order flow to bulge bracket brokers who spent years building superior high frequency databases to power their proprietary algorithmic trading applications.

Many off-the-shelf algorithmic trading applications exist but many are limited to a set of pre-defined strategies. It’s also important for CEP systems to include flexible APIs to popular industry execution management systems like Portware, FlexTrade, InfoReach and others.

This broker added to an existing simple VWAP execution strategy by using the Vhayu Velocity platform to deploy custom time interval VWAPs, a Target Volume Participation Strategy and an Order Staging Strategy. Velocity is integrated with FlexTrade to execute the firm’s algorithmic trading strategies. The master order is entered into the FlexTrade EMS, and passed over to Vhayu Velocity via the FlexTrade API, which is based on the Java Messaging Service (JMS).

With the addition of Vhayu Velocity, the investment bank now has the same trading technology capabilities as the world’s top ten brokerage firms, each of which spend millions of dollars a year on support of proprietary systems. For a fraction of the cost, this broker now offers state-of-the-art algorithmic trading services to its clients across global markets. It delivers more profitable trade executions based on real-time market information as well other sources such as reference data and historical trading information. This firm believes that choosing Vhayu has given it an edge in the algorithmic trading space years ahead of what it could have achieved from building a solution itself.

• Event-driven publish/subscribe capabilities
• Use of standard development languages
• Integration capabilities with third party C++ libraries (FlexTrade, Portware, InfoReach)
• Ability to implement customized trading strategies for institutional clients
• Improved time between identification of trade opportunity and order transmission
• A strong marketing tool for the sales traders to showcase to institutional clients