Royalblue's 'BlueBox' Mixes Algorithms

NEW YORK—The U.S. arm of U.K.-based trading technology vendor Royalblue is planning to launch a system in the second half of this year that allows traders to structure combinations of trading algorithms, dubbed BlueBox, using the vendor's Fidessa transaction platform.

With BlueBox, users will be able to access the algorithmic trading tools from sell-side firms via application program interfaces (APIs) that are part of the Fidessa system. Users will be able to access the algorithmic wares of firms like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs, and use BlueBox to create specific algorithms that they can then integrate with their own trading algorithms.

"The smart way to operate … is to blend them," says Mark Ames, CEO of Royalblue's U.S. business. "You can use an algorithm, for example, to do more with less and add more value to trading. BlueBox allows people to look into the algo tool [whereas] … with a black box, people are often unsure when to use it."

Ames says the vendor is finishing up the prototypes of BlueBox and placing them in the vendor's development queue. The vendor hopes to have a finished product to launch during the second half of this year.

He says BlueBox will be a Java-based application framework that will be able to run on multiple hardware configurations. "It's a wrapper to make the wealth of Fidessa APIs available to a trader," he says.

In other news, the vendor is planning to make basket equity trading available alongside trading in single stocks on its hosted version of the Fidessa platform. The support for basket trading is a function that has been available on the original installed version of Fidessa for around two years. The new support will be available during the second quarter of this year.

Ames says this new capability will be achieved by adding a layer to the ASP (application service provider) version of Fidessa that would enable users to trade baskets and still drill down to the individual stock level. He says that the new function would give them more buying power by being able to net positions between single stock trades and basket trades, and would give more visibility across a firm's trading operation.