Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Service overview
Bank
of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) provides bespoke analytics to expose trends and
opportunities for improvement of trading style or strategy customisation, in
order to save on transaction costs. Another differentiator is the experience of
BAML consultants in trading, finance, consultancy and statistical and
analytical research.
Research and analytics
Execution
consultants work closely with market structure and quantitative engineering teams to produce studies, ranging from current market
trends, trading strategy performance or client specific research. Recent papers
include ‘Instinct – performance during recent market volatility’ and ‘Trading
small cap names in EMEA’.
BAML
provides published reports to clients on an ad hoc basis, or as requested. The
majority of data that the firm provides to clients is tailored to their
specific requirements or style of trading. The data is captured from BAML’s
electronic algorithmic engines and enriched with stock, sector, client amongst
other static data, as well as tick data from the company’s internal
consolidated tape. Metrics such as benchmark strikes and statistics are
available at an historical and intra-trade level of granularity.
Customisation
BAML
customisation ranges from providing minor tweaks to a clients’ algorithmic
strategy, to designing and implementing new strategies to meet client’s specific
trading objectives.
Client support
In
execution services, BAML has teams of people dedicated to providing technical
support. Execution consultants work closely between clients and the firm’s
internal technical support to ensure issues are resolved efficiently.
Together
with four other investment banks that provide transaction costs analysis (TCA)
to other clients, BAML recently proposed an industry-wide forum for agreeing
consistency of TCA definitions and metrics. This resulted on a paper titled
‘Open TCA’.