Pipeline Trading Systems LLC operated private equities and options trading systems from 2004 to 2012. As an agency broker, it offered equities traders two methods for trading large blocks of stock with minimal impact on price: a crossing network (also known as a dark pool), and an algorithm switching engine. In 2011, it agreed to settle the action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the disclosure of the activities of its liquidity providing affiliate between 2004 and 2010. [1] [2] [3]
The affiliate implemented a patented market structure invention that used an execution quality rebate to align the liquidity provider's incentives with those of Pipeline's institutional clients. [4] The crossing system earned high marks for execution quality in third party research, [5] [6] [7] but was shut down in 2012 following the SEC action.
Pipeline was founded by Fred Federspiel, a nuclear physicist and complexity scientist, and Alfred Berkeley, a former president and vice chairman of NASDAQ. Following its settlement in 2011, the company rebranded itself in January 2012 and now operates as Aritas Securities LLC. [8]
An electronic communication network (ECN) is a type of computerized forum or network that facilitates the trading of financial products outside traditional stock exchanges. An ECN is generally an electronic system that widely disseminates orders entered by market makers to third parties and permits the orders to be executed against in whole or in part. The primary products that are traded on ECNs are stocks and currencies. ECNs are generally passive computer-driven networks that internally match limit orders and charge a very small per share transaction fee.
Alfred R. Berkeley, III is an American businessman who was president of NASDAQ Stock Market, Inc. from 1996 until 2000 and later vice-chair of the NASDAQ from 2000 to 2003. Currently, Berkeley is Chairman of Princeton Capital Management, LLC. Berkeley was also director of RealPage, Inc.
A trading room gathers traders operating on financial markets. The trading room is also often called the front office. The terms "dealing room" and "trading floor" are also used, the latter being inspired from that of an open outcry stock exchange. As open outcry is gradually replaced by electronic trading, the trading room becomes the only remaining place that is emblematic of the financial market. It is also the likeliest place within the financial institution where the most recent technologies are implemented before being disseminated in its other businesses.
Susquehanna International Group, LLP (SIG) is a privately held, global trading and technology firm. SIG comprises a number of affiliated entities specializing in trading and proprietary investments in equities, fixed income, energy, commodity, index and derivative products, private equity and venture capital, research, customer trading and institutional sales.
In finance, a dark pool is a private forum for trading securities, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Liquidity on these markets is called dark pool liquidity. The bulk of dark pool trades represent large trades by financial institutions that are offered away from public exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, so that such trades remain confidential and outside the purview of the general investing public. The fragmentation of electronic trading platforms has allowed dark pools to be created, and they are normally accessed through crossing networks or directly among market participants via private contractual arrangements. Generally, dark pools are not available to the public, but in some cases, they may be accessed indirectly by retail investors and traders via retail brokers.
High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic trading in finance characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no single definition of HFT, among its key attributes are highly sophisticated algorithms, co-location, and very short-term investment horizons in trading securities. HFT uses proprietary trading strategies carried out by computers to move in and out of positions in seconds or fractions of a second.
Flash trading, otherwise known as a flash order, is a marketable order sent to a market center that is not quoting the industry's best price or that cannot fill that order in its entirety. The order is then flashed to recipients of the venue's proprietary data feed to see if any of those firms wants to take the other side of the order.
The Knight Capital Group was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. With its high-frequency trading algorithms Knight was the largest trader in U.S. equities, with a market share of 17.3% on NYSE and 16.9% on NASDAQ. The company agreed to be acquired by Getco LLC in December 2012 after an August 2012 trading error lost $460 million. The merger was completed in July 2013, forming KCG Holdings.
The May 6, 2010, flash crash, also known as the crash of 2:45 or simply the flash crash, was a United States trillion-dollar flash crash which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes.
Virtu Financial is an American company that provides financial services, trading products and market making services. Virtu provides product suite including offerings in execution, liquidity sourcing, analytics, broker-neutral, multi-dealer platforms in workflow technology and two-sided quotations and trades in equities, commodities, currencies, options, fixed income, and other securities on over 230 exchanges, markets, and dark pools. Virtu uses proprietary technology to trade large volumes of securities. The company went public on the Nasdaq in 2015.
International Investment Group (IIG) is an American financial institution that specializes in short-term trade finance and commercial finance with a focus on emerging markets. Through its affiliate IIG Capital it provides financing to small and medium-sized merchants, traders and processors with a need for supply chain financing.
Fred Federspiel is an American technology entrepreneur, nuclear physicist and inventor.
Bloomberg Tradebook, LLC., the agency broker of Bloomberg L.P., serves global investment advisors, money managers, hedge funds, proprietary desks and broker dealers, with access to global trading venues, proprietary trading algorithms, execution consulting services, pre-and-post trade analytics and independent research. Through a trading platform integrated with the Bloomberg Professional service, Bloomberg Tradebook provides its customers with direct market access to more than 110 markets and global trading solutions for equities, futures, and options across 44 countries, as well as 43 currency pairs. Tradebook offers over 55 proprietary algorithms designed for each asset class and market.
William A. Lupien was an American business executive in the financial industry. He traded actively in the financial markets throughout his career. He was a Specialist and later Exchange Governor on the Pacific Stock Exchange (PSE), a Nasdaq market maker, the Chairman and CEO of Instinet, the Chairman and CEO of OptiMark Corporation, and the Managing Director of the General Partner of a hedge fund, Kudu Partners LP. He helped develop the world's first electronic trading system. He also served on the Advisory Committee on the National Market System. In 1999 he was featured in a CNBC television series as one of five people who had changed the course of the securities industry in the 20th century.
Investors Exchange (IEX) is a stock exchange in the United States. It was founded in 2012 in order to mitigate the effects of high-frequency trading. IEX was launched as a national securities exchange in September 2016. On October 24, 2017, it received regulatory approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to list companies. IEX listed its first public company, Interactive Brokers, on October 5, 2018. The exchange said that companies would be able to list for free for the first five years, before a flat annual rate of $50,000. On September 23, 2019, it announced it was leaving its listing business.
Tradeweb Markets Inc. (Tradeweb) is an international financial technology company that builds and operates electronic over-the-counter (OTC) marketplaces for trading fixed income products, ETFs, and derivatives. Its customers include banks, asset managers, central banks, pension funds and insurance companies. Tradeweb's headquarters are in New York City.
Securities market participants in the United States include corporations and governments issuing securities, persons and corporations buying and selling a security, the broker-dealers and exchanges which facilitate such trading, banks which safe keep assets, and regulators who monitor the markets' activities. Investors buy and sell through broker-dealers and have their assets retained by either their executing broker-dealer, a custodian bank or a prime broker. These transactions take place in the environment of equity and equity options exchanges, regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), or derivative exchanges, regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). For transactions involving stocks and bonds, transfer agents assure that the ownership in each transaction is properly assigned to and held on behalf of each investor.
XTX Markets Limited is a British algorithmic trading company based in London. It was founded in January 2015 by Alexander Gerko, who is currently co-CEO alongside Hans Buehler. The company employs 190 people globally and uses algorithms to trade the difference in market prices across a variety of venues.
Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that uses a set of smart contracts to create liquidity pools for the execution of trades. It is an open source project and falls into the category of a DeFi product because it uses smart contracts to facilitate trades instead of a centralized exchange. The protocol facilitates automated transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain through the use of smart contracts. As of October 2020, Uniswap was estimated to be the largest decentralized exchange and the fourth-largest cryptocurrency exchange overall by daily trading volume.
Citadel Securities LLC is an American market making firm headquartered in Miami. It is one of the largest market makers in the world, and is active in more than 50 countries. It is the largest designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange.