FlexAdvantage Blog

While the concept of big data has focused on the problem of collecting and processing vast quantities of data i— the trend is moving toward data analytics.

Increasingly banks are turning to the field of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to extract valuable information from voice, documents, and audio to boost productivity on trading desks.  It’s all part of a broader push to gain efficiencies by training machines and bots to analyze language, capture insights, and replace manual tasks and drive workflows further downstream.

Algo wheels have become a popular technology in equities trading, but now there are signs that algo wheels are expanding beyond equities into multiple asset classes such as futures.

U.S. lawmakers authorized a study focusing on the provision of investment research for small issuers, a sign they are wary of the U.S. adopting the European Union’s MIFID II unbundling rules which have brought sweeping changes to the research business.

By Ivy Schmerken Eighteen months after MiFID II rules to unbundle research payments from executions have been in force in Europe, U.S. asset managers are dealing with uncertainty around paying for research and how to compete with global firms that adopt the EU rules. Many US asset managers are evaluating the need for increased transparency …

With the uptick in Asian currency trading and the growth of electronic trading, Singapore’s regulator is working with the financial industry to build an FX trading hub and expand FX market infrastructure, a move to improve liquidity and price discovery during Asian trading hours.

As asset managers become more data-driven in their analysis of execution quality, they are reallocating order flows among their broker-dealer relationships at a faster pace. 

The proliferation of software applications on financial desktops is a sign of innovation in capital markets. But moving data from one third-party application to another is not always seamless and user interfaces (UIs) are typically different. Now there’s a push to make the desktop emulate the user experience on mobile phones where Android and iOS apps are aware of one another and share data.

Fundamental investment managers are mining alternative data, but some worry that the same data sets have been sold to too many people and the strategies may be overcrowded.

With a new contractor taking over the Consolidated Audit Trail project in March, the order-tracking system for all U.S. stock and option trading activity is pushing ahead with equities testing starting in December and a go-live date of April 2020.