Charles River Development has formed partnerships with Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley to offer Charles River IMS users direct access to both CSFB’s Advanced Execution Services (AES) and Morgan Stanley’s Benchmark Execution Strategies. The new partnerships aims to give Charles River clients the ability to place and execute trades using both sets of algorithmic trading mechanisms without exiting their Charles River applications.
Access to CSFB AES and Morgan Stanley MS-BXS is available in the recently released Charles River IMS v7.2.
AES provides investment managers with the ability to efficiently execute trades using the same suite of automated, algorithmic trading strategies employed and developed by CSFB’s team of quantitative analysts and traders. Developed through comprehensive execution research and continuous live experimentation by CSFB’s aforementioned team, the strategies are currently in use by over 250 CSFB clients. Today’s partnership will give investment managers the ability to place and execute trades using CSFB AES via FIX directly from Charles River IMS. Traders who take advantage of the strategies can reduce market impact and improve trading performance vs. benchmarks in North American, European, and Asian markets.
Charles River IMS is a software application for portfolio management, electronic trading and order management, and compliance monitoring. “Charles River IMS is in use at several of our most valued clients,” says Manny Santayana, director, AES Sales for the Americas at CSFB. “We are looking forward to deploying our market leading algorithms to these customers globally, in conjunction with Charles River.”
“Credit Suisse First Boston’s sophisticated trading algorithms have proven to be an extremely successful execution tool for CSFB’s traders and promise to be equally as effective for our clients,” adds Peter K. Lambertus, CEO and president at Charles River Development. “Our clients expect superior functionality, powerful features, and unmatched performance from Charles River IMS, and we are committed to meeting those expectations by continuing to add innovative capabilities that facilitate order efficiency and increase productivity.”
Under the terms of the deal with Morgan Stanley, the broker-dealer’s algorithmic Benchmark Execution Strategies (MS-BXS) can also be accessed from the Charles River Investment Management System. The joint venture will allow investment managers using Charles River applications to place and execute trades using Morgan Stanley’s proprietary collection of electronic execution strategies via FIX. Traders can take advantage of these automated algorithms to increase trade efficiency and minimize market impact while maintaining complete control of the execution process.
MS-BXS is a collection of systematic and dynamic execution strategies which utilize proprietary algorithms to formulate dynamic “trade plans” relative to a selected benchmark (i.e., Arrival Price, VWAP, and Close). Each benchmark strategy attempts to minimize the shortfall vs. that chosen benchmark by optimizing the tradeoff between market impact and market risk. Charles River has embedded MS-BXS in its Charles River Manager and Charles River Trader applications, making it easy for portfolio managers and traders to execute FIX-based trades via MS-BXS without leaving the Charles River applications. FIX-based executions return to the Charles River applications automatically. MS-BXS is available at no additional cost to clients using Charles River IMS Version 7.2.
“Both Charles River IMS and Morgan Stanley’s Benchmark Execution Strategies play important roles in our daily trading operations,” says Paul Taylor, director, head of program trading at Schroders. “The ability to directly access Morgan Stanley’s algorithmic trading strategies from our Charles River trade blotter is a positive development for us. It will certainly save our traders time and effort, and help streamline the overall trade execution process.”
“This joint venture with Charles River now provides us the ability to seamlessly distribute Morgan Stanley’s Benchmark Execution Strategies to Charles River OMS (order management system) customers, which will significantly enhance our global reach of algorithmic trading strategies,” add Brian Fagen, managing director, Morgan Stanley.
“Morgan Stanley’s Benchmark Execution Strategies offer investment managers terrific productivity advantages in today’s highly competitive trading environment,” says Peter Lambertus, president and CEO at Charles River Development. “Algorithmic trading is gaining significant momentum throughout the investment management community, and today’s joint venture is in line with our strategy to provide customers superior and efficient options for streamlining their trading operations.”