Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup Lead Equity Broker Rankings

Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citigroup provided the most liquidity globally for institutional equity traders in 2024, according to newly released data from Abel Noser Solutions, a Trading Technologies company.

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan rounded out the top five. Bank of America was top-ranked in North America. UBS was #2 in both Europe and Asia/Pacific.

The Abel Noser Solutions 2024 Global Equity Broker Liquidity Rankings were calculated using executed trades from more than 350 anonymized institutional buy-side participants collected, with a total universe of about $37 trillion of trades. More than 400 brokers were observed.

The rankings were generated by TT Broker Scorecard, which Trading Technologies launched in January 2025 to provide an independent proxy of the institutional market.

Traders Magazine caught up with Peter Weiler, EVP Managing Director, Data & Analytics at Trading Technologies, to learn more about TT Broker Scorecard.

How and why did TT Broker Scorecard come about? 

Peter Weiler, Trading Technologies
Peter Weiler

Broker rankings aren’t a new idea, but it was only because of advanced technology that we were able to do this now.  We’ve started with all of our buy side data globally, which covers about $36 trillion in equity, so it’s a real proxy for the institutional marketplace. One big challenge is that when the buy side reports their brokers, they do it in many different ways, and there can be different iterations of a broker’s name. So we had to harmonize all that data, which isn’t easy and can’t be done just with Excel or SQL. 

Trading tends to be concentrated in a few broker names. Especially if a buy-side firm is far away from a marketplace – say they’re in New York but trading in Singapore, or Thailand, or some other emerging market – they tend to just go to the big boys to trade. But in some instances if you run through our analysis, you’ll find some specialized or local brokers that might be as good or better. Our product helps the buy side find liquidity, and it helps the sell side better understand where they’re strong and where they need to be stronger. Those are the use cases. 

Is there anything else like this in the marketplace currently? 

There have been offerings in the past, but they’ve been fairly primitive because the technology just wasn’t there. Bloomberg has a product on its terminal for folks who use their execution platform, but they don’t get into commission rates or execution quality. And then some people do rankings based on indications of interest, but that’s just IOIs. The unique part of our product is that it is based on real executed trades. This is trades that were executed, as opposed to advertised out there in the marketplace, which doesn’t really mean much until you act on it. 

What feedback have you had in the two months since rolling this out? 

It’s been very well received. So far we’ve focused mostly on buy-side users, but we want to start getting the word out there more on the sell side.  

We’re really excited about this product. The next step after equities will be fixed income, which I think will even be more powerful. In equities it’s customer to customer, so you don’t know who your counterparty is, but in fixed income you typically know the counterparty behind your trade.  

Will you do adjusted rankings? 

It’s not just high-level broker rankings by region and globally – users can segment and drill down into the data to understand who is the #1 broker for European large-cap names, or APAC healthcare, for example. We’re going to include execution quality as well as commission rates, so if a buy side sees it’s paying 10 basis points for emerging markets but others are paying seven or eight basis points, they can have a conversation with their broker.

Through the API, users will be able to choose and segment brokers to compare. We’re starting out by publishing at a high level, by region globally. But I can certainly see a scenario whereby the end of next year the rankings go two or three pages with different cuts. 

What’s the impetus for market participants to use TT Broker Scorecard?

It’s important for buy-side traders to have information about what broker they should use.

It’s also important for portfolio managers, because you might be running a small cap emerging markets portfolio and trading with three or four brokers, without knowing that those brokers aren’t even in the top 10. Brokers can advertise their strengths, understand positioning and compare their rankings to the brokers who match their profile in the marketplace. If you learn that information, brokers and buy-side shops can have constructive conversations regarding their trading relationships.