According to Kirk Allen, senior vice president of trading at NWQ, the firm decided on FlexTRADER because it would allow its traders to input their own trading benchmarks and measure executions against it.

"Most trading platforms have pre-set benchmarks, but that is not an issue with FlexTRADER," said Allen. "We chose the platform because it is fully customizable and broker neutral."

"Today, no other trading platform enables the buy-side to measure the relative performance of algorithms," said Vijay Kedia, president of FlexTrade Systems.

With FlexTRADER, however, traders can make this comparison keeping in context the benchmarks various algorithms are pursuing, whether they are indigenous or provided by brokers or vendors. For example, a trader can identify the most suitable arrival price algorithm for stocks in small cap semiconductors over the past 20 trading days.

Allen further explained that FlexTRADER also offers real-time transaction cost analysis, which is unavailable with most electronic platforms, and will give the firm a better idea of the performance of its traders.