FlexTrade Enhances FlexTrader EMS with Data Visualization Support

TradeGuide is a series of pre-defined web components that reside within FlexTrader, an EMS that has won numerous WatersTechnology awards over the years. According to FlexTrade, TradeGuide offers pre-trade and in-flight feedback on orders; it consumes data from multiple sources, which is interprets and draws conclusions from, which are then presented in an easy-to-digest format. Rather than rely on the traditional row and column table format, TradeGuide introduces a new way of visualizing trade data, according to the vendor. 

Questions
The initial release offers both pre-trade and in-flight guides, designed to answer specific trading related questions. For example, the question, "What's the best way to route this order?" analyzes historical trade data and suggests trading strategies based on that analysis, while the question, "How big is my footprint?" results in one of the in-flight guides monitoring and analyzing a variety of FIX (Financial Information eXchange) tags and market information in real time, alerting traders when the trade's "footprint" is too large or an unusual event occurs, such as receiving a lit (on-exchange) execution when using a dark-only (dark pool) strategy.

In-flight alerts are presented in an actionable format, allowing traders to adjust trading styles and aggressiveness, or even to kill orders when necessary. These alerts can be linked to FlexTrader's rules engine, enabling automated responses to specific events, such as sending a message out to a broker when a trade is executed outside the spread.

"This represents a complete re-assessment of the way trade data is presented," says Andy Mahoney, the London-based business development director of FlexTrade UK Ltd. "We threw away the rule book; we abandoned outdated tabular data presentation in favor of actually answering the questions our clients ask while managing trades."