• An industry-first, Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ enables buyside traders to stimulate liquidity at market levels, or outside of the spread, before committing to a bookbuild
• New functionality allows trading desks and investment teams to interact with each other in outsized liquidity price formation, and opportunistic alpha generation, optimising deals before they launch on the platform
• Driven by client demand, Price Discovery in Appital Insights™, significantly shortens the period of time where shares are locked in to Appital whilst also providing more time for investment teams to react to situations
• Buyside traders retain full control over how and when they interact with their counterparts and platform liquidity

Appital, the peer-to-peer price discovery and liquidity sourcing technology for asset managers, announced the launch of a new functionality designed to stimulate natural liquidity among Appital’s buyside clients and discover pricing dynamics on larger ADV orders on their pad.

Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ is an industry-first functionality that enables buyside traders to invite select feedback on live orders and gain insights on potential pricing and volume before committing an order to a bookbuild or before launching a bookbuild themselves.

Buyside traders retain full control over how and when they interact with their counterparts and platform liquidity. PMs can respond to price discovery processes without generating an order in their EMS, allowing for opportunistic liquidity discovery and alpha generation. The Appital workflow now enables new, uncommitted order types during price discovery, which can transition to committed order types once traders decide to launch a bookbuild. This significantly reduces bookbuild duration while increasing the likelihood of its success. At the same time, buyside firms retain anonymity and minimise the risk of leakage or price erosion.

Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ evolves the existing workflow and goes one step further: Appital clients can unlock latent liquidity by inviting specific firms to provide feedback on potential orders and – if sufficient demand is captured in price discovery – the information flows anonymously back to the originator to launch a bookbuild, and the liquidity is realised.

Brian Guckian, Chief Business Development Officer at Appital, said: “Our clients are very excited about this new price discovery functionality. They can pick their counterparts, expose a potential deal to them, and get feedback on volume and pricing, before deciding to go ahead with a bookbuild.

This is a new and unique workflow that gives clients full control over the bookbuilding process and the ability to proactively stimulate market liquidity.”

Mark Badyra, CEO of Appital, said: “With Price Discovery in Appital Insights™ we are digitising yet another step in the high-touch trading mechanism while also minimising risk of information leakage and price erosion. This aligns with our strategy to deliver unique workflows to trading and investment teams. I believe that illiquidity issues can be solved globally by bringing technological innovation into the equity market and providing distinctive functionality to the buyside. With Price Discovery in Appital Insights™, firms are able to generate orders that would otherwise not exist, resulting in increased deal flows and liquidity events.

The first half of 2024 has been a period of remarkable growth for Appital, with consistent, month-on-month increases. As well as this, our liquidity profile has diversified from a client perspective, with more and more firms joining and using our technology every day.”

Appital has reached $12bn of buyside liquidity on its platform, with average orders of 2.7 days ADV and opportunities between $1 million and $260 million. 43 asset managers with >$20trn AUM are now signed up, with 60+ more in the onboarding stage, managing an additional $30trn AUM.

Source: Appital