Investment Technology Group, a provider of technology-based trading services and transaction research, has announced it is adding Posit Alert to its suite of crossing products in Europe.
POSIT Alert is a new indications-based facility that seeks out crossing opportunities among participating clients.
POSIT Alert will expand available liquidity by alerting clients to crossing opportunities. Traders participating in POSIT Alert select the stocks they want to have available for crossing. POSIT Alert then searches for trading opportunities with other clients that have opted to participate. When the system identifies a match, a pop-up message alerts the trader, who can decide whether to trade and in what quantity. The trade crosses at the midpoint price of the underlying market price and there is no negotiation.
In addition to POSIT Alert, the POSIT suite of crossing solutions includes POSIT Match and POSIT Now. POSIT Match offers scheduled crosses with concentrated liquidity that enable institutional traders to anonymously match orders. POSIT Now provides continuous crossing throughout the trading day. Since the introduction of MiFID in November 2007, POSIT is now categorised as a multilateral trading facility.
Commenting, David Stevens, Chief Executive Officer of ITG in Europe, said: "ITG is committed to providing clients with innovative technologies to improve the trading process. The POSIT suite of crossing products enables our customers to trade anonymously and more efficiently and POSIT Alert is a natural extension of the products we've developed to meet the needs of our clients."
The POSIT universe in Europe comprises some 9000 stocks from 15 countries and connectivity to the system is simple: it can be accessed from a number of ITG front ends, such as the Triton execution management system and ITG Channel, as well as FIX, Bloomberg and directly from users' own order management systems.
POSIT is suitable for all types of trades, both in terms of size, sector or style - be it blocks, lists or single stock orders. In order to allow users more control over their trades, a number of constraints can be set against orders, such as price, size, or buy/sell imbalance, and particular time horizons can be specified.