10.23.2013

Options Trading Buildouts Continue

10.23.2013
Terry Flanagan

Deutsche Bank’s Autobahn electronic trading business has launched Autobahn Options, offering complete U.S. equity options trading capabilities.

Autobahn Options provides access to major electronic options exchanges, including Chicago Board of Options Exchange, International Securities Exchange, NYSE Arca, Boston Options Exchange, BATS Options and NYSE Amex.

Using the new suite of option-focused strategies, clients can trade single stock options, equity index and ETF options.

“Investors are increasingly looking to incorporate equity options into their trading strategies. To meet the demand for access to this burgeoning electronic market, Deutsche Bank expanded its leading Autobahn offering to support clients dealing with the growing fragmentation,” said Jose Marques, global head of electronic equity trading. “Deutsche Bank is dedicated to providing clients with trading strategies that help them navigate this increasingly complex marketplace.”

Autobahn Options provides clients a full suite of investment solutions for electronic options trading, including single-leg and complex multi-leg strategies as part of a suite of algorithms, direct market access, and smart order routing.

“Options traders have very specialized order types and contingent trades such as multileg strategies, which we provide,” Marques said. “Deutsche Bank offers the Autobahn platform for all our electronically-traded products, including futures, rates, and FX. Adding options to our product suite was a natural progression.”

Autobahn Options consists of a suite of algorithms to facilitate electronic execution of options. “The institutional buy side trader has gotten used to using algos, and dealing with fragmentation and competition with low latency liquidity providers,” Marques said. “Autobahn Options extends what we already offer for equities to help options clients dealing with these market conditions.”

Separately, OptionsCity Software has introduced Freeway Analytics, a simulation platform that allows traders and developers to quickly build and back-test strategies, discover opportunities and simulate real world trading based on sub-millisecond futures market data. The new non-execution offering will be hosted by OptionsCity and was built using OptionsCity’s Freeway automated trading technology.

“Automated trading is more popular than ever, but it remains incredibly time-consuming and expensive to build, test and deploy new trading models,” said OptionsCity chief technology officer Victor Glava. “With Freeway Analytics, traders can focus on developing a series of strategies that works in real-world market conditions, not on how to integrate terabytes of data.”

Freeway Analytics is a hosted system that provides traders with a powerful visualization engine, an exchange simulator, and is built on a flexible and open architecture. Upon launch, historical futures market data is being provided by Vertex Analytics, but any desired market data source can be easily integrated.

The visualization engine allows traders to see how strategies will perform in different market conditions for a better understanding of how a specific trade will behave over time. The exchange simulator ensures that models take into account real-world latency and dynamic market conditions. Furthermore, Freeway Analytics’ open architecture makes it simple to integrate with popular statistical analysis tools such as Matlab or R.

“Trading firms spend an inordinate amount of time and money on managing market data,” said James Austin, CEO and founder of Vertex Analytics. “In fact, the inability to effectively store and maintain high frequency futures data is limiting their ability to be successful. Because Vertex’s historical data is an integrated part of Freeway Analytics, OptionsCity’s customers can focus on trading, not data management.”

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