Townsend Releases Upgrade to RealTick EMS
January 19, 2009
Trading technology provider Townsend Analytics last week released an enhanced version of its flagship RealTick execution management system (EMS) that it says allows users to route orders across multiple dark liquidity pools, displayed venues and broker algorithms in a single click.
Chicago-based Townsend, which became a subsidiary of Barclays last year when the London bank acquired the U.S. operations of Lehman Brothers, said that many of the improvements came in response to client demand for personalization. Customers now have access to customizable order forms for specific trading styles and strategies, including list trading, and improved multibroker functionality. Its new Order Splitter feature allows users to determine how a trade will be divided across various platforms, making it "easy for traders to quickly seek liquidity across multiple destinations--both dark and lit," according to the company.
The overall theme of the release is to "streamline and simplify our traders' workflow," especially for those who use more than one prime brokerage and trade with multiple brokers globally, said Stuart Breslow, Townsend's CEO and chief information officer. Townsend's core competency--global multibroker trading--"is now something front-and-center in people's minds," said Breslow. "And the fact that we are also a multi-prime trading system is something that we believe has tremendous appeal now that institutions are trying to diversify where their assets are being held and who they're using as prime brokers."
"By integrating all the tools that institutional traders need to trade multiple asset classes with their choice of global destinations, we have greatly simplified their workflow," added Breslow in a statement. Townsend's broker-neutral RealTick platform aggregates multiple brokers, destinations and products onto a single screen, where all are accessible from customizable menus for electronic order routing. Clients can trade equities, options, futures and foreign exchange.
