Agency broker Bloomberg Tradebook has begun offering services in the Taiwanese equities market. It will provide agency DMA access and a variety of proprietary trading tools, including its Iceberg and Target orders, as well as Dynamic Relative Pricing, which enables users to move their quotes to account for shifts in the market.
“We are also releasing a custom suite of algorithms for this market in the upcoming weeks,” Jim White, head of global equity electronic trading product development at Bloomberg Tradebook, told theTRADEnews.com. “We will test these in the market before offering to our clients.”
Bloomberg Tradebook will offer access to stocks on both the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the GreTai Securities Market – essentially an over-the-counter venue. “To all intents and purposes, it looks like one marketplace on our system,” said White. “There are three major stock indices in Taiwan, so we offer the ability to trade the stocks on all of them.”
In the Asia-Pacific region, Bloomberg Tradebook already operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. “Bloomberg Tradebook is constantly looking to expand the breadth of its product offering globally,” said White. “What we have found in Europe and Asia is more clients that are trading a particular sector or index, and therefore need to be able to trade all the component stocks, so it is important to make sure we fill out that offering.”
White said in-depth geographic coverage was required by brokers to facilitate the country-by-country trading decisions made by clients in Asia. For example, clients may move into a particular country to trade in a specific sector or employ a certain strategy. “You see a little bit more of that going on in Asia, and so it is important to be in those market centres,” he said.
The company is planning to expand further both in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere. “We are looking at a couple of other markets in Asia and a few other emerging markets,” said White. “One launch is about a month away, and others will probably be in the first quarter of 2009.”