FlexTrade Systems says New York-based Rosenblatt Securities went live in October on FlexTRADER. The firm is also using FlexTRADER over Linux.
FlexTRADER is an equity trading and order management system used by both buy-side and sell-side firms, including hedge funds, investment managers and broker-dealers.
“FlexTRADER over Linux is an ideal fit for Rosenblatt Securities, a firm that doesn’t look to maintain a large in-house IT department and specializes in serving quantitative and other institutional clients who closely analyze and measure execution costs,” says FlexTrade Systems President, Vijay Kedia.
Rosenblatt Securities Inc. is an agency-only broker that trades listed and OTC securities and portfolios on behalf of its money manager and broker-dealer clients. “As the markets evolve and continue to demand more complex trading strategies and time-slicing algorithms, FlexTRADER will help us provide even better service to our transaction cost-sensitive institutional clients,” says Rosenblatt Securities President & CEO, Richard Rosenblatt. “In the short period of time FlexTRADER has been live, we have identified several potential applications to improve performance relative to our benchmarks.”
The firm also explained that it selected FlexTRADER after an exhaustive review of other systems. As a broker, Rosenblatt Securities found FlexTRADER’s broker-neutral platform particularly appealing. “FlexTRADER also won because it’s the only system we evaluated that could meet our time-to-market needs without overwhelming the firm’s technology resources,” says Rosenblatt Securities Chief Operating Officer, Joseph Gawronski. “FlexTRADER is every bit as flexible as its name implies. We can implement our trading strategies by simply tweaking FlexTRADER’s VWAP and other algorithms. FlexTRADER’s reputation as the Rolls Royce of program trading systems is well deserved.”
Rosenblatt Securities chose to run FlexTRADER on Linux beacuse it believes the operating system is reliable as well as cheap. “Linux’s open source platform is optimized for performance and entails limited trade-offs,” says Gawronski. “FlexTrade has also performed a great deal of testing on Linux to ensure its reliability. As a result, our resource utilization for FlexTRADER on Linux has been lower than expected.”
FlexTRADER is a customizable system, with pre-defined trading strategies and tactics for lists as well as single stocks. The ability to easily write and revise customized analytics and quantitative trading strategies within the system, makes FlexTRADER a preferred choice among those engaged in agency trading, index arbitrage and other proprietary and standard strategies such as VWAP, transition trading, pairs and long/short trading. This flexibility, for example, gives statistical arbitrage and program traders the ability to act swiftly and with ease in mercurial market conditions, particularly as they look to minimize market impact, transaction costs and risk exposure when trading large, multi-sided portfolios.
FlexTRADER complements a firm’s straight-through processing (STP) requirements, because buy-and sell-side firms can receive orders and send back executions electronically via FIX. Both sides can trade orders instantaneously, within the confines of a pre-determined, rules-based setting. From a single, neutral platform, orders are routed automatically to various points of execution including approximately 50 broker-dealers, all leading ECNs and primary exchanges.
FlexTRADER’s open architecture is configurable for multiple traders over a network, and runs on Sun Solaris, Linux and Windows NT operating systems.
Rosenblatt Securities has been providing agency brokerage services to institutions since 1979. A member of the NYSE, NASD, ArcaExchange and major ECNs, Rosenblatt Securities trades both listed and OTC securities for its customers. By not engaging in principal trading, receiving payment for order flow or shopping orders, Rosenblatt Securities seeks to minimize market impact and lower transaction costs for its customers. With a long history of servicing quantitative accounts, Rosenblatt Securities maintains a significant presence in portfolio trading as well as block trading. Through its relationship with Birinyi Associates, the firm couples market-leading money flows and stock market research with its own execution services. Based in New York City, Rosenblatt Securities also services European clients through its Dublin subsidiary, RSI-Europe Limited.
Founded in 1996, privately held FlexTrade Systems Inc. has a global client base of approximately 75 buy- and sell-side firms, including many large program trading desks at major investment banks, hedge funds and investment management firms. Headquartered in Great Neck, NY (U.S.A.), FlexTrade also operates an office in London. Clients include Barclays Global Investors, Jefferies & Company, Inc., JP Morgan Chase, HSBC Investment Bank, Rosenblatt Securities Inc., SAC Capital Management LLC and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC.