Tourmaline Partners, LLC, one of the world’s leading outsourced trading solutions firms, today announced the addition of an “execution dashboard” to its client website to provide its buy-side clients with greater transparency into their total broker research spend.

Now, in addition to providing comprehensive trade detail and aggregated CSA (commission sharing arrangement) administration, Tourmaline tracks and reports each client’s total broker spend, combining all broker CSA payments and attributed trading. (‘Attributed trading’, or ‘attribution’, arises when clients ask Tourmaline to trade with specific brokers as payment for research services. This is most common with clients outside the MiFID II regime.)

“Investment Managers continue to reduce broker lists and rely on a smaller subset of key trading partners,” said Tim O’Halloran, Tourmaline Managing Director. “As Tourmaline grows, more clients are asking us to direct trades to research brokers with whom they do not have an established trading relationship in addition to using CSAs to pay them for their services. Providing this flexibility to pay for research via multiple paths supports a best execution framework.”

The execution dashboard provides an easy-to-use interface for intraday monitoring and reporting of client commissions. Excel download capabilities enable further custom analysis and integration with other services.

“We constantly strive to improve our clients’ trading experiences, and part of that is making enhancements to our platform and client website in response to their demand,” said Aaron Hantman, Tourmaline’s Chief Executive Officer. “In the wake of MiFID II and similar regulations, demand for transparency around trading has never been greater. While we have been providing our buy-side clients with attributed trading since we launched, our new execution dashboard now brings unprecedented clarity to clients, providing them with a full picture of their broker spend.”

In October 2017, Tourmaline launched their commission management offering in response to a growing demand for CCA and CSA administration and aggregation, providing 24-hour access to a custom-built encrypted website, online payment review and approval and comprehensive, centralized reporting.
The flexibility to fund research budgets with CSAs, aggregation and attributed trading is unique to Tourmaline Partners. It allows the buy-side to remunerate their brokers thoughtfully, manage their counterparty lists and still seek best execution.

Tourmaline Partners provides tailor-made, outsourced trading solutions and best-execution expertise to over 300 institutional investment clients ranging from emerging hedge funds to multi-billion dollar asset managers.