12th October, 2006
Fidessa® launches BlueBox algorithmic trading solution to the sell-side

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ - 12 October 2006 - royalblue (LSE:RYB), provider of Fidessa, announced today at the Securities Traders Association Annual Conference, the U.S. launch of Fidessa BlueBox, its fully integrated, scalable algorithmic solution that offers sell-side firms industry standard benchmark strategies as well as a framework for building their own proprietary models. BlueBox will be launched in Europe and Asia in early 2007.

“BlueBox breaks financial barriers for firms wanting to move into algorithmic trading,” said Martin Hakker, EVP of Marketing for Fidessa. “The first algorithmic system to be fully integrated with a full-service Order Management System (OMS), BlueBox provides a cost-effective means for firms of any size to offer distinctive and customized algorithms directly to their clients. At the same time, BlueBox gives traders the power to control and interact with their strategies.”

In addition, Fidessa’s high performance, scalable architecture can handle a vast number of models and trades, while its flat-rate charging structure allows firms to grow their business without incurring more expense.

“Firms can reduce commissions, retain control over their own trading volume and differentiate themselves in a competitive environment, while maintaining confidentiality and improving their service to clients,” said Mr. Hakker.

A comprehensive toolkit for hosting, building and deploying internal algorithms, BlueBox allows traders to control and monitor their algorithmic trading from their OMS screens while leveraging Fidessa’s market access, regulatory reporting and straight-through processing capabilities.

Traders can actually interact with each slice of the internally hosted algorithms in real-time. They can track key performance indicators in real-time and step in to alter parameters on the fly, slow down or speed up trading, or pause or stop the algorithm to react to changing market conditions or to mitigate risk as well as use pre-, post- and intra-trade analytics to evaluate performance.

BlueBox provides two offerings. BlueBox Strategies supplies out-of-the-box algorithms, including VWAP, TWAP or Stealth, Arrival Price, Percentage of Volume and Corporate Buy Back, which can be customized to meet a firm’s needs.

The second offering BlueBox Framework goes a step further providing a cost-effective, functionally rich environment for efficiently developing and deploying proprietary algorithms. Developers can design, build, test, analyze and improve the performance of their models before seamlessly releasing them into a live environment.

Firms can focus on building truly competitive algorithms, instead of dedicating resources to build and maintain a sophisticated technical infrastructure or dealing with the complex integration with order management, execution management, market data and compliance systems.

“BlueBox puts algorithmic trading within reach. Now, firms of any size can host their own internal models as well as build their own proprietary models and offer customized algorithms directly to their customers in a cost-effective way,” Mr. Hakker said.

Fidessa group is a world-leading supplier of multi-asset trading, portfolio analysis, decision support, investment compliance, market data and global connectivity solutions for both the buy-side and sell-side globally. Available as a simple workstation or as an integrated application suite, the Fidessa and Fidessa LatentZero products are built on the clear vision of providing the richest functionality, coverage and distribution to the financial markets community.

The Fidessa suite is used by 85% of tier-one, global equity brokers providing sophisticated multi-asset trading, market data, order management and execution capabilities to all tiers of the sell-side.

The Fidessa LatentZero suite is used by the world’s largest asset management firms through to smaller specialist managers and hedge funds, and provides comprehensive portfolio analysis, real-time P&L, what-if analysis, investment compliance, order and execution management, and post trade processing tools, across all asset classes, to all tiers of the buy-side.

Fidessa’s global network carries over 130 million messages a month covering DMA, Care and Algorithmic orders, Indications of Interest and FIX Allocations between over 1,800 buy-sides and 310 brokers across 100 markets worldwide.

Head-quartered in London and with offices in New York, Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Toronto and San Francisco, Fidessa group serves 22,000 users across 600 clients globally. Fidessa group was founded in 1981, has revenues of around US$350m, employs over 1,200 people and has been fully listed (LSE:FDSA) since 1997.

For further information, please contact:

Marc Weinstein
Spring, O'Brien & Co for Fidessa
(212) 520-7100, ext. 216
marcw@spring-obrien.com

Back

Top