Banc of America Securities (BAS) says its newest equity algorithm, Ambush, which is designed to swiftly execute large orders with minimal market impact, has experienced the fastest adoption rate of any of its seven algorithmic trading strategies.
Ambush, which was launched earlier this year, is available on BAS' algorithmic trading platform, Equities Automated Strategy Execution (Ease).
BAS says the algorithm uses sophisticated order placement techniques to achieve optimal results on trades where both time and information leakage are critical. Taking into account variables such as price, depth of book, trade frequency and price volatility, Ambush strategically breaks up large orders into smaller pieces and sends them to the market for fulfillment over an extremely narrow time frame.
Bill Harts, head of strategy for equities at BAS, says: "By balancing execution speed and market impact, Ambush allows our customers to quickly fill large orders with reduced share price movement and represents a new class of algorithms."
Earlier this year electronic broker Instinet launched a 'stealth liquidity aggregation algorithm' called Nighthawk that simultaneously accesses ECN and major dark pools of liquidity as well as a 'stealth order management algorithm' called Cobra which is designed to offload large stock orders while leaving the spread unchanged.