Over the last decade, cash equities trading has experienced a high degree of technological and business consolidation, driven by the downward pressure on margins in cash equities brokerage.
Since the installation of first transatlantic undersea cable, trading technology providers were tasked with simple mandates: Deliver information faster, from as many sources as possible and help investors and market operators to make better decisions and implement them quickly.
Beginning in the early 2000s, when the algorithms and software capable of performing transaction cost analysis (TCA) on a semi-automated basis first became prevalent, the definition of the function was always: a method of determining the effectiveness of a set of transactions performed by a counterparty – the key word within that definition being ‘effectiveness.’
In 2019, the global financial services industry is set to spend an estimated USD 50bn on the raw, historical markets and transactions data inputs required to fuel a broad spectrum of daily trading activities across all major asset classes.
Willis Bruckermann, GreySpark Partners Analyst Consultant, examines how high- and low-touch trading have changed in the past decade, and some of the implications thereof for the future structure of the flow equities market.
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