As complex trading strategies take hold in Canada, trading systems are being upgraded to reflect market structure changes.

Fidessa has added Canadian market access strategies, which allow users to pre-define multiple trading strategies for use either direct to venues or via the Fidessa smart order router.

“We’ve spent a lot of time and effort refining the smart router,” said Ritesh Patel, director of client services at Fidessa Canada. “With this release, we’ve changed the interface to allow more flexibility for users to create predefined trading strategies, and call upon them automatically when they enter the order rather than having to turn them on and off manually.”

The advent of multiple markets in the form of alternative trading systems and dark pools has created a spike in demand for direct market access, low-latency connectivity and consolidated market data.

Users can now post liquidity across numerous venues using seven-day or 30-day historic trading data from the Fidessa Fragulator, providing detailed analysis of where trading in particular stocks or indices takes place.

“This means that in a multi-market environment, where one stock might trade heavily on one exchange versus another, users can dynamically allocate orders across the marketplace,” said Patel.

The system has been enhanced to enable traders to identify potential crossing opportunities by matching live order information to current and historic client interest within the system.

The integration of historical data and analytics in this latest version of the Canadian trading platform is a core part of the Fidessa Intelligence initiative, which is aimed at making a comprehensive suite of analysis tools available to Fidessa’s community of buy-side and sell-side firms.

“The objective is to enable traders to make better sense of their trading environment, identify new opportunities, fine-tune their execution activity in real-time, and independently measure and benchmark their overall trading performance,” said Patel.

Fidessa is hosting its Canadian trading platform in Equinix’s Toronto data center, located at 151 Front Street, and at TMX Group’s co-location facility, obtaining the benefits of direct high-speed access to the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange and Montreal Exchange trading engines and market data feeds.

“Technology providers offer domain expertise to exchanges that don’t have the resources or core competencies in the specific area the technology provider may have,” said Andre Craig, vice-president at TMX Datalinx, the information services division of TMX Group. “Examples of this include technology providers that specialize in adding value to exchange data content or add value in terms of delivering/packaging/hosting exchange core content. This can help exchanges extend the product life cycle of existing products by reaching new markets or help exchanges create new products and enter entirely new markets.”