GL Trade Rolls Out Reg NMS Offerings

NEW YORK—Paris-headquartered trading software and service provider GL Trade plans to release several new features for its order management system (OMS) and new applications that address Regulation NMS issues in the U.S. markets over the next few weeks, DWT has learned.

"The U.S. market is very competitive—there are only about 30 brokerages a year that change their OMS systems," says Franck Lambert, head of strategic marketing projects, front to back solutions with GL Trade. "Reg NMS is driving a lot of this change."

Among the major additions to the ASP-based GL Stream trading solution will be support for multi-leg direct market access (DMA) orders that should be available sometime this quarter, says Lambert. The new capability lets users model each leg of the trade in DMA, archive it and re-model it during the life of each leg, he adds.

"We also have new Reg NMS-related tools in the pipeline," he says.

Two of these tools are version 1.0 of Trade Checker and Destination Checker, adds Michael Richards, senior project manager with GL Trade.

Compliance Checker takes every filled order and goes back to the time of the trade and pulls up the top-of-book price at each market venue in order to demonstrate best execution under Reg NMS, says Richards.

Destination Checker measures the price and speed of individual trades from a point outside a brokerage's system to the market and back again in milliseconds, he says.

"These are two separate products that will be packaged together," says Richards.

GL Stream will also offer new Nasdaq market-making capabilities in equities, adds Lambert.

The new support is based on the vendor's existing GL Market Maker platform for other markets, says Richards. "We based it on our London offering, which was the best fit for the U.S. market," he says.

Richards expects the new capability to be debuted at the Securities Trader Association of New York's (STANY's) annual conference on April 19 in Manhattan.

Other OMS features include a new ergonomically designed GUI, says Lambert.

"We worked with clients to develop the new screen," says Christophe Darce Wright, COO of GL Trade.

"You have to remember that this is a multi-language tool," says Richards. "A trader can be using a U.S.-formatted front end and be sitting next to a trader using a French front-end."

The vendor also expects to release its next generation of execution management system (EMS), dubbed GL EMS, which will offer more features than the vendor's current GL Winway EMS offering.

The original GL Winway offering is targeted for a soft-dollaring arrangement between prime brokers and their clients for DMA tools, says Hugues Debroubaix, director of connectivity trading solutions for buy side with GL Trade. "It, however, doesn't offer features such as list management," he says.

The new platform, which is expected to ship mid-month, offers support for trading lists as well as sub-lists, or children orders, Debroubaix explains.

In addition, traders can view transaction cost research (TCR) from every screen in the system so that they can determine the market impact of their orders, he says.

Other features include GL XLS, a Microsoft Excel plug-in that allows traders to drag and drop data from spreadsheets directly into the system, and a template editor, "because no asset managers ever sends the same spreadsheet," says Debroubaix.