Simo Puhakka, Head of Trading for Pohjola Asset Management, shares his experience trading in the Nordic markets, giving his opinions on interacting with HFT, using TCA and knowing whether you can trust your broker.
Nordic HFT
The prospects for High Frequency Trading (HFT) are really up to regulators. It will be a free market, but as we all know, regulatory changes affect the whole trading landscape. For example, we can see what is happening in France and the debate that is going on in Sweden, which are quite hostile towards HFT, so those countries can expect some changes.
Personally, I think that HFT is a good thing for the market, as long as you have the proper tools to deal with it. There are a number of small firms that have been suffering from HFT since MiFID I because they lack the proper technology and tools to measure and deal with it. We have not suffered in our dealings with HFT, and I would actually say in many cases, it is the opposite. HFT firms seem to add liquidity and when you have the proper tools to deal with it, you can take advantage of it.Speaking of tools, we started building our own Smart Order Router (SOR ) a year and a half ago. The goal was to create an un-conflicted way to interact with the aggregated liquidity. In this process we went quite deep into the data and turned processes upside-down with the result that we have full control of how we interact with the market.
On the other hand, I welcome technological innovation from the sell-side; for example, brokers now disclose the venues where they execute trades on an annual basis. The surveillance responsibilities that brokers have are beneficial. Many of the small, local brokers and buy-sides, however, are now finding it challenging to upgrade their technology.
Trusting your Broker
Our approach was to take control of our order flow and only use our brokers for sponsored access. We chose full control because, in some cases, I do not fully trust brokers to deliver what I am asking. These questions first arose a few years ago, and we realized we needed to create a transparent, fully-controlled, non-conflicted path to the market. How you interact with different venues – even lit venues, where you have more transparency – will affect your choice of strategy. In most cases, you are better off without brokers making decisions for you. The root of the problem is, when you send an order to the broker, what happens before it goes to the venue? What control do we have over the broker infrastructure, including their proprietary flow, internalization, market making and crossing, not to mention the routing logic?
When we dug into the data, we were quite surprised to see that, although a broker was connected to all the dark liquidity, many of the fills were coming from that particular broker’s dark pool, suggesting there are preferences in the routing logic. Brokers want to internalize flow, which is not a problem, if you are aware of potentially higher opportunity costs. When it comes to dark liquidity, that is an even bigger problem, since our trades were often routed to the broker’s own dark pool or those it has arrangements with.
To interact with multiple liquidity pools, we decided it was important to define our own routing logic, separate from our brokers’. It all comes back to whether we trust our brokers to deliver what we requested, and in our case, we found it hard to believe.
In theory, broker internalization can add value to our trades, but when we looked at our TCA, there was quite a consistent pattern that brokers with their own order books and market making operations, perform worse than agency-only brokers, which tend to have fewer activities. The reason for this is not technology or limited resources, which bulge bracket firms have plenty of. We think that we are suffering because they are internalizing and making markets. Since we began using our own smart order router, we have seen better numbers than the best agencies. Just looking at our numbers, this decision has made quite a difference.
TCA Best Practices
There are two ways of looking at TCA. The traditional use for TCA is very important to us. We analyze all of our trades, and because we only have one executing broker (our own technology), we do not compare brokers anymore. We do pay a lot of attention, however, to venue quality. We get more dark fills today because we have full control of the apparatus. In the past, I would have been concerned, if we used a broker dark algo, that there would be a lot of liquidity coming from that broker dark pool. Now, we are connecting to most of the European dark pools through our logic and I have seen an increase in dark fills.
More specifically, we use TCA to look at the fills coming from the dark pools, and how much noise they make on the lit market, before and after I get the fill. Admittedly, it takes hundreds of fills from a particular venue before you can actually see that the numbers are stabilizing, but through this process, we try to avoid toxic venues that create volatility in the lit market after or before we get the fill. To do this, we measure the midpoint standard deviation of the lit market just before and after we get the fill. Our benchmark is implementation shortfall, and since we are not comparing brokers, we use TCA to see if the numbers are consistent. Nonetheless, hiccups in volatility will increase slippage in our TCA numbers.
New Priorities
Volatility and risk have pushed us to bring more of our trading operations in-house. We still use other brokers, with about 80% of flow going through our SOR and 20% using our brokers’ trading methods. It is our understanding that discussing the effects of different market environments and strategies is more important than discussing the brokers themselves. We used to ask that question, but we have discussed our numbers with our PMs and they are convinced by the way we interact with the markets. In the kind of market where close-to-close volatility and intraday volatility is high, the challenge is to demonstrate for the PMs what effect this will have on trading strategies. For example, when the intraday volatility picks up, you need to be more aggressive. If you are using reactive strategies and trading over the day, then you are more likely to be impacted by volatility than implementation shortfall strategies. Most of the time our desk has full discretion to trade, but some orders come with parameters and in those cases, we focus on maintaining the feedback going back to PMs.
