Automated trading software company Portware is now offering electronic access to the brokerage services of Cuttone & Co. on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
The companies announced today an agreement to provide users of Portware’s broker-neutral trading platform access to Cuttone’s floor brokerage services, including participation in NYSE’s parity allocation model and discretionary quotes. Cuttone is known for its large stable of floor brokers on the NYSE, said to be the largest of any firm.
“Many of the benefits that were always available using a floor broker are now for the first time being offered electronically,” said Eric Goldberg, president and chief executive officer of Portware.
Under NYSE’s parity model, orders are shared equally among floor brokers, designated market makers (DMMs) and the public order book. The bulk of bids and offers, however are in the public book. By having access to a floor broker, electronic traders can have a better chance of getting their orders filled than waiting at the end of the public line.
Goldberg said that in the past traders could get better fill rates going to floor brokers, but they would have to put in a phone call down to the floor. Now, they can send that order electronically and at the same time have the order automatically entered into their trading platform, keeping all of their trading data together.
Clients routing orders to Cuttone will also benefit from greater flexibility near the market’s close due to the floor broker’s ability to use discretionary quotes. Unlike other orders, discretionary quotes do not have to be in 15 minute prior to the close.
Keith Bliss, senior vice president and director of sales and marketing at Cuttone, said while discretionary quotes have been around for years, until recently they always had to be done manually. Only within the last couple of years have handheld devices and the underlying database technology at NYSE allowed floor brokers to connect electronically.
“The most premier money management firms on the globe now have a different entry point into the New York Stock Exchange,” Bliss said. “And doing it through Portware gives them the advantage of having all of the management of their order flow and executions in the same box.”
