Investment Technology Group, a provider of technology-based trading services and transaction research, is adding Posit Alert, a new indications-based facility that seeks out crossing oppor
Investment Technology Group, a provider of technology-based trading services and transaction research, is adding Posit Alert, a new indications-based facility that seeks out crossing opportunities among participating clients, to its suite of crossing products in Europe.
ITG says Posit Alert will expand available liquidity by alerting clients to crossing opportunities. Traders select the stocks they want to have available for crossing, and Posit Alert then searches for trading opportunities with other clients that have opted to participate.
When the system identifies a match, a pop-up message alerts the trader, who can decide whether to trade and in what quantity. The trade crosses at the midpoint price of the underlying market price and there is no negotiation.
In addition to Posit Alert, the suite of solutions includes Posit Match, which offers scheduled crosses with concentrated liquidity that enable institutional traders to match orders anonymously, and Posit Now, which provides continuous crossing throughout the trading day. Since the introduction of MiFID last November, Posit is categorised as a multilateral trading facility.
‘ITG is committed to providing clients with innovative technologies to improve the trading process,’ says the firm’s chief executive for Europe, David Stevens. ‘The Posit suite of crossing products enables our customers to trade anonymously and more efficiently, and Posit Alert is a natural extension of the products we’ve developed to meet the needs of our clients.’
The Posit universe in Europe comprises some 9,000 stocks from 15 countries. The system can be accessed from a number of ITG front ends, such as the Triton execution management system and ITG Channel, as well as FIX, Bloomberg and directly from users’ own order management systems.
Posit is suitable for all types of trades, both in terms of size, sector or style, whether blocks, lists or single stock orders. To allow users more control over their trades, various constraints can be set against orders such as price, size, or buy/sell imbalance, and particular time horizons specified.
ITG offers a number of other trading tools and services including algorithmic trading, direct market access and portfolio trading, and a suite of transaction analysis tools such as ITG TCA and ITG Logic.
