| Industry | Software |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Trading systems |
| Website | www.quodfinancial.com |
Quod Financial is a privately owned adaptive trading technology provider which specialises in software and services such as algorithmic trading, smart order routing and internalisation of liquidity. The firm provides electronic trading solutions to liquidity venues, exchanges, retail brokers, buy side and sell side institutions.
The company is headquartered in London with offices in Paris and New York. It has teamed up with Catena Technologies in Singapore, to take advantage of liquidity fragmentation in the Asia Pacific.[1][2]
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Quod Financial was formed in 2004 via the business acquisition of Reuters Mercury Online, which also used to be a trading technology provider.
Quod Financial's application modules include smart order routing for buy side and sell side firms, modules for cross-asset and multi-asset trading, as well as online trading for retail and institutional brokers.
ASOR is designed for the sell side firms and supports equity and derivative asset classes. The nature of the ASOR is dynamic and adaptive, which means it makes execution decisions based on real-time market events and also it adapts its self to both the market and sell side's tarding infrastructure in real-time. It hunts liquidity in both lit and dark pools using the same algo. One of the main advantages of ASOR is that it incorporates the use of historical execution statistics into decision making process. For example, there is a feature called Probability of Execution, which finds optimum venues for passive orders within lit venues, and also gives some level of stock opacity within dark pools. The audit trail feature of the ASOR is particularly useful to prove the best execution policy as it shows the entire decision making process as well as a snapshot of the market. Quod Financial offers the ASOR also as a SaaS (Software as a Service), i.e. a hosted solution, based in London Interxion data centre with FIX connectivity. This allows market participants to connect cost effectively to Quod Financial’s Smart Order Routing and connectivity solutions.[3]
ACross, a MiFID II and Dodd-Frank Ready application module, which allows brokers to take care of their crossing opportunities. It can be combined with a dynamic SOR, enabling the user to work orders externally and cross internally when crossable flow is available.
AOLT is a multi-asset web-based trading application module. AOLT is based on Microsof's Silverlight technology that allows continuous streaming to web pages. The AOLT is designed for retail broker, who in turn provide this application to their investors. The investors get the full trading functionalities to trade online. One of the advantages of AOLT is that it calculates the buying power of the investors. Also brokers can manage their relationships with their investors as well as pushing complementary data such as quotes and research to them.
AEP is a high performance/low latency multi-asset platform that is inherent in all the above application modules and comply with the new SEC ruling prohibiting Naked Access.[4] It also uses Informatica’s Ultra Messaging Streaming Edition (UMSE), Ultra Persistence Edition (UMP) and Ultra Messaging Queuing Edition (UMQ) in its underlying architecture.[5]
AEP's modules include: trading-specific algorithmic engine, order and quote management, connectivity and middleware.
The Algorithmic Engine is an adaptive financial event processing engine that understands the relationship between parent and child orders, different order types and market events. It supports a library of the most important and common execution algorithms such as TWAP and VWAP. It also has an open C++ API that allows users to create, customise and extend the algorithms.
This module is designed for sell side instititions and manages the whole lifecle of an order. Quod Financial's OMS also takes care of pre-trade risk management and real-time functions such as position keeping, P&L and care management.
The AEP is set up to handle upstream and downstream data systems through native gateways using an API or through FIX connectivity and proprietary gateways. Quod Financial has its own FIX engines versions 4.2 to 5.0. The Market Data FeedHandler provides native exchange and other venue FeedHandlers, as well as leading market data providers.
Quod Financial leverages two reliable and low latency messaging solutions, called TIBCO Rendezvous and Informatica (29West) that provide dual support for financial message information and market data using a publish/subscribe distribution. These modules do load balancing, are highly scalable and have fault tolerance mechanisms.
There are two types of delivery models for all application modules at Quod Financial.
In Enterprise model the application module is installed on client's data centre and maintained by themselves.
In the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, a hosted model, the software is installed at one of Quod Financial's proximity data centres[6]. In this model economies of scale is applied to application operations and hence users can take advantage of reduction of overal cost. In general, there are a number of advantages in using SaaS: