Citi to extend electronic options trading to buy side clients

Institutional clients can now access Citi's option smart-routing platform through the same interface they use to trade other asset classes with Citi, providing buy side clients with a full suite of electronic trading services for equity related products.

"Citi is pleased to extend its market leading electronic options platform to the buy side community," said Kevin Murphy, Head of U.S. Option Electronic Execution. "Citi is a leader in the options market, currently executing over 10% of industry options volume. Our institutional clients can now reap the benefits of Citi's liquidity and price improvement opportunities in options, as they have been with equities."

Electronic option orders executed at Citi are eligible for price improvement. Citi provides unique logic to best utilize listed exchange electronic crossing mechanisms for enhanced price improvement opportunities. This proprietary process does not utilize IOIs or result in any information leakage.

Options special order types currently available to buy side customers include:

• DMA - includes both limit and market orders; simultaneously sweeps the order across all exchanges
  
• Sweep-Post - an intelligent limit order that sweeps the market by absorbing all liquidity at the inside market, and if liquidity is exhausted, it moves to the next price level; user can choose where to post remaining quantity
  
• Sweep-Out - sweeps the market by absorbing all liquidity at each price level, then cancels out any balance after all liquidity is exhausted up to limit price
  
• Reserve (Iceberg) - a large directed order to one exchange and displayed in user defined partial quantities; used with Sweep-Post order type to post balance of order as reserve quantity

Citi will soon offer additional order types for buy side clients including a full suite of volatility based options algorithms. Clients can currently access Citi's electronic options capabilities via any third party OMS/EMS vendor, including TradingScreen, Bloomberg EMSX, RealTick, FlexTrade, thinkpipes from thinkorswim, ConvergEx's Eze OMS and Wolverine Execution Services (WEX).