Investment bank Citi has completed a two-year project to revamp its global algorithmic trading platform for institutional equity trading clients.
The new platform was a total overhaul of its previous algorithmic platform and was done to help Citi keep up-to-date with the changing market structure across the globe.
“While we continued to provide tactical enhancements to original platform, we decided to rebuild a brand new system from the ground up,” Young Kang, global head of algorithmic products, Citi, told the TRADEnews.com. “We opted for rebuilding so we can set up a proper foundation and framework to build a smarter system that can adapt to new market conditions with enhanced historical and real-time analytics, new features, improved latency and enable more customised solutions.”
Specifically, the new platform will enable symbol-specific trading decisions driven by real-time and historical analytics, optimal balancing and control across trading styles, easy management of trading venues clients want to execute on and a sophisticated limit order model.
Clients will be also be afforded full control and diagnostics of child orders with analytics pertaining to the relevant care order, real-time data of strategy performance and progress, and greater self monitoring alerts for exceptional conditions with market.
The platform has been tested internally over the last 10 months and is currently being rolled out in the US, Europe, the Middle East, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea.
Country specific algorithmic strategies will be developed by Citi’s regional teams. Kang added that the new platform would be capable of handling FIXatdl, the algorithmic trading development language developed by messaging standard provider FIX.
“We are FIXatdl compliant so we can deploy the latest features to algorithmic strategies quicker and create trader specific strategies overnight, compared to the months it would have normally taken,” said Kang. “We have also spent a lot of time ensuring the switchover to the new platform would be 100% seamless for our clients from the front-end perspective.”