Apama (UK) Limited, which makes innovative software applications for securities trading houses, says it has enhanced Apama Event Modeler, a tool for use in algorithmic trading strategies.
The firm says the latest additions will increase speed and efficiency. “In the highly competitive trading space algorithmic trading strategies must evolve as quickly as the market,” says John Bates, CTO and co-founder, Apama. “Traditional ‘hard wired’ or ‘black-box’ trading solutions prohibit change. The beauty of the Apama ‘white box’ system is that it provides a completely open platform, which can be adapted easily to take advantage of the latest technology developments. This gives our customers continuous first mover advantage.”
Within the Apama Event Modeler, a scenario manager provides a graphical composition environment for trading strategies. The new functionality includes a Smart Block Library for Programme Trading and a Smart Block Builder. Apama explains that Smart Blocks are flexible components that can be plugged into a trading strategy to provide real-time trading indicators and order management functions.
With the new enhancements, says Apama, users can automatically select a comprehensive set of Smart Blocks that are immediately available from within the strategy and plug together a wide range of complex trading strategies more easily and efficiently. In addition, a copy-paste capability has been added to Scenario Manager so that new trading strategies can be rapidly constructed by plugging together relevant pieces of existing structure.
The company adds that Event Modeler’s Dashboard Framework enables strategies to be automatically deployed as web-based applications. The Apama Dashboard Wizard, that allows users to specify presentation details of their run-time strategy before deploying it on the Web, has been enhanced. The wizard’s newly enriched functionality now enables the user to automate even more powerful strategies, for improved cost and time-savings.
In addition, Apama plans to offer customers of its full-function product an optional back-testing service. This will link the Apama Event Modeler to historic data stores; enabling historical data to flow through the user’s trading strategies. In this way users will be able to leverage their historical data and blend stored and live data for research or back-testing purposes.
“The latest enhancements to the Apama Event Modeler are in-keeping with our roadmap and our promises to customers,” says Peter Beard, CEO, Apama. “Our vision is that through clever design, increasing trading capability can be made intuitively available to trading experts across asset class. We continue to deliver on this vision to provide next-generation graphical business tools that can help to set tier one financial institutions, and their customers, ahead of the competition.”
Apama technology is used by a number of leading investment banks, including ABN AMRO, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan.