RTS Realtime Systems Announces Highlights of Automated Trader Magazine Global Trading Trends Survey

LONDON, June 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- RTS Realtime Systems Group, a leading global trading solutions provider, announced today some results from Automated Trader Magazine's comprehensive Global Trading Trends Survey. More than 600 participants answered up to 144 questions on the 2012-13 survey, which RTS sponsored for the third consecutive year. The survey was designed to help the magazine identify the latest trends, attitudes, insights and preferences as they relate to a wide range of trading styles, strategies and practices.

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RTS CEO Steffen Gemuenden said: "The answers and analysis in this year's Automated Trader survey provide tremendous insight into changing trading behavior as the market continues to mature, participants tackle challenges such as regulation and multi-jurisdictional issues, and technology keeps evolving. In particular, the survey results provide analysis of key topics of interest to RTS clients, including latency, risk, regulation and market structure. We believe the results further reinforce the value of our strategy, including a multi-asset class offering of trading, risk management and hosting solutions that spans continents and both established and emerging marketplaces."

RTS this week is exhibiting at the sixth annual International Derivatives Expo 2013 in London.

The full survey results extend to over 160 pages and include more than 100 charts. RTS this week is making available to its clients a condensed special report highlighting those topics which may be of greatest interest to them.

John Howard, Automated Trader CEO, said: "We now see trading firms addressing combined challenges by diversifying their activity across an increasing number of markets and asset classes, but also diversifying into a much broader range of trading styles. Perhaps of greatest significance is the renewed interest in lower frequency strategies. The market appears to be in the process of squaring its own circle and is itself, as a collective body or ecosystem, shifting the balance back towards more traditional trading styles. Perhaps some will say that to some extent the market can be seen to be regulating itself."

Gemuenden said in his introduction to the survey's special RTS report: "The challenges are compounded by the strong trends towards multi-asset class and multi-region trading and with that, the need to be able to monitor, control and extract value from multiple algorithmic trading engines running in different locations globally. With pre- and post-trade functions more inter-dependent than ever before, the design and management of distributed algorithmic deployments, and the efficiency of the processes that they feed, looks set to become one of the key determinants of overall trading performance."

According to the report, one of the key changes taking place is related to the type of latency that matters to market participants: "The trend towards automation throughout the trade life-cycle identified in 2010 and further confirmed in 2011 has consolidated, but the significant point to note [this year] is the shift in focus from outright execution latency to decision latency and value latency."

The editors define decision latency as the time taken to process incoming data to trigger a trading signal and generate an order, and value latency being the time taken to get the post-trade data stream into other processes. With the high frequency space having become very crowded, the report notes that many firms are now stepping away from strategies that are dependent on being first into the order book to instead focus on lower frequency strategies. Many of these strategies with longer trade time horizons tend to be much more complex and dependent on a more diverse array of data inputs, making them more intensive to process. Those firms with the ability to minimize decision latency maintain an advantage, according to the report.

About RTS Realtime Systems Group

RTS (www.rtsgroup.net) delivers high-performance, end-to-end technology products and services across asset classes and continents to elite financial institutions and commodity trading houses. The firm is a global leader in robust electronic trading software, connectivity, hosting, matching and risk management solutions. With standardized low latency connectivity gateways to 135+ exchanges and execution venues worldwide, the firm provides proximity hosting and co-location services to 80+ venues via its global data center network. The RTS infrastructure enables clients to deploy sophisticated trading strategies quickly, securely and cost-effectively throughout multiple trading desks and sites. RTS has offices in Amsterdam, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York, Pune, Singapore and Sydney.