Tom Whelan, managing director and global head of Instinet Technology Solutions, outlines the ever-changing scope of analytics.
What did this year’s win for “Best Trading Analytics Tool” mean to your firm?
The European Markets Choice Awards are already becoming an important programme in EMEA, so we’re very honoured that Instinet Analytics was selected for “Best Trading Analytics Tool” at this year’s ceremony. It’s a core commitment for us to provide deep, customised, and dynamic analytics tools for every stage of the trade life cycle, to help our clients better understand and more precisely manage their performance.
And, of course, it’s our privilege to sponsor the Instinet Positive Change Awards, which recognise the achievements of those who have a far-reaching impact — the firms and the individuals who also serve as agents for positive change in the world around us. Honouring the good works of our friends, peers and clients are every bit as exciting to us as the accolades that we may also earn for ourselves. We congratulate all of our fellow award nominees and recipients.
Which recent enhancement are you most excited about for clients?
Our philosophy has always been to continuously evolve our tools and technology. Over the last year, we’re quite excited to have released “Analytics Capsules” – nimble, pop-up widgets that give traders the ability to assemble their own dashboards using a broad library of real-time metrics, such as price momentum, liquidity, corporate actions, volume patterns, and venue usage, in order to visualise specific data-driven “dials” or trading situations.
As an example, our Outliers visualisation tool highlights the orders that might need intervention, including orders with large liquidity demands, poor performance, or big price movements. Our new set of Capsules are highly configurable and intuitive, allowing traders to ringfence and highlight specific types of live streaming data/analytics and historical data on individual names, without disrupting their overall view of the blotter and/or other pre-set analytics windows.
We’ve also made significant investments in the tools geared for Market on Close/Target Close traders. Our pre-trade tool highlights auction liquidity demand, compares different hypothetical target close strategies, and plans trade schedules. Our intraday tool includes updates on expected closing auction volumes and liquidity profiles. And, our post-trade tool delves deeply into performance analysis by using participation rates in auction vs continuous, pre-trading decisions, unexpected changes in volume, hypothetical back testing, and broker behaviour comparisons. This front-to-back package has been quite popular with clients for single and multiday rebalances and transitions.
What’s your Analytics team working on at the moment?
Currently, we’re expanding on our broker wheel capabilities for clients, so that the analytics monitoring and feedback loop works hand-in-hand with execution for them. For example, we now offer real-time TCA for intraday monitoring, and we send broker ranking reports within an hour of the markets’ close, allowing clients to make their adjustments immediately. In addition, we’ve been focusing our own analysis on optimisation, using elements of machine learning as a key to providing nuanced, actionable insights and opportunities for even better performance.
Our back-end infrastructure is also being transformed as we migrate to the AWS cloud as part of a larger initiative around big data management. This not only dramatically improves our speed, scale, and access to data, streamlining new releases, it also enhances the carbon neutral footprint of our technology. Again, an example of how we try to be mindful of our larger impact in the world around us.
What’s lies ahead in the long-term initiatives at Instinet?
Long term, we’re focused on enhancing our self-service tools to empower our clients to manage their own workflows, features, and more. As we plan for the next generation of the trading desktop, we’re also looking to leverage the ever-evolving array of technologies, software, and standards (for example, HTML5/FDC3) to ensure that our clients have access to not only “best-in-class” capabilities, but also interoperability across apps.
We recognise that clients require more access to tools that automate and monitor order flow, so we’re continuing to make improvements to our API offerings and customisable automation tools, as well. One of the biggest challenges our clients face is “overload” – too much data noise, yet not enough actionable information. The opportunity here is to take disparate data sets and serve them up to clients in more intelligent and optimal ways.
We provide tools, such as our Indigo Real-Time Analytics platform, which strive to make it faster and easy to understand complex data sets graphically. But the world around us is dynamic and continually advancing, so we’re focused on even greater improvements in not just this area, but in a wide array of ways to ensure that our platforms not only respond to clients’ needs, but also anticipate the needs that may be right around the corner.
