Buyside traders are now able to source block liquidity outside the U.S. in foreign stocks or those listed in 27 countries outside the U.S. via POSIT Alert.
Agency-only broker ITG’s buyside- block-focused dark pool, POSIT Alert, now accesses a 28 total markets rather than just within the U.S. POSIT Alert is a buyside-to-buyside block system, so these blocks of stocks are already on ITG’s customers’ blotters.
Alert, a specific portion of the pool that is available only to the buyside, allows them to see available blocks outside the U.S. on a single screen. Blocks can be located on foreign buysiders’ blotters or on the U.S. buyside. For example, ITG could have a U.S. manager in Boston trade a block of Sydney-listed stocks with a U.S. manager in New York.
Prior, traders and ITG had to use multiple blotter scrapers to find liquidity across the global markets. So now there is only one scraper that is able to access stocks listed in all 28 markets. Alert works within the POSIT pool.
Alert also incorporates more blotter sweeping filtering and “hot” button to help traders find and execute block trades more efficiently, anonymously and with minimal market impact, according to Jamie Selway, managing director and head of electronic brokerage at ITG.
“The buyside trader’s front-end gets a facelift,” Selway said. “This new set-up modernizes and allows traders to customize what they want to see and how they see it.”
For example, buyside users can create “hot buttons” to see just what data they need to see or change what portion of their blotter is swept by ITG. The trader can also see what portion of his block order was not swept and executed and have it automatically placed directly into an algorithm to be traded. Prior this was done manually by the trader, Selway said.
“When trading you want to make things intuitive to the trader. This is not a full-blown execution management system or an order management system, but a tactical tool for block trading with an improved look and feel of an EMS or OMS,” Selway said.
This next generation of POSIT Alert is integrated with most major third-party trading systems.
