Trading strategy management firm Apama has moved to capitalise on buy-side interest in software that can modify black-box automated trading programmes by signing its first two hedge fund clients.
The Apama platform enables institutions to apply their own intelligence and tweak the trading strategies of third party black box systems in real-time. The firm claims to have secured contracts with two un-named hedge funds, one in the US and the other in Europe, as its first buy-side clients.
Apama also says that two of its investment banking customers are in the process of extending the technology to their corporate clients to enable them to adopt and modify trading strategies on the fly, from their desktop, via the Internet. The firm lists JPMorgan, ABN Amro and Deutsche Bank among its clients.
John Bates, CTO and co-founder, Apama, says: "Over the last year, we have seen an increasing demand among buy side financial institutions to establish greater control over the trading strategies operated by their prime brokers or specialist service providers. At a minimum, they want to tweak strategies to give them their own unique competitive differentiation. Some even want to build their own."
Peter Beard, Apama CEO says hedge funds are keen to escape the level-playing field imposed on them by third party automated trading systems and adopt more creative trading strategies.
He says: "Using the Apama platform, hedge funds gain a new level of access and control over the trading strategies operated by their prime brokers or outsourced global securities service providers, while at the same time enjoying the cost-benefits of using a third-party system."