Japanese-owned broker Daiwa Securities America has deployed Aegis Software's direct market access and trading system, Athena.
Designed to service its buy side clients as well as Daiwa's own desks, the Athena product is being hosted internally and offers DMA capability to Nyse, Archipelago and other markets. Initially the service will support equity trading, but Daiwa plans to add connectivity to the CME and the ISE in the next few months.
Commenting on the implementation, Michael Mollemans, head of electronic execution sales, Daiwa Securities America, says: "The Athena software allows us to map client-specific FIX messages into native exchange formats with a minimum of latency. Additionally, Athena's administrative and reporting tools allow us to provide a high degree of customer service."
Daiwa Securities America says the Athena platform replaces a service provided by an external vendor and was implemented after it decided to bring its DMA service back in-house.
Says Mollemans: "We had been using an outside vendor, but did not have the level of control that we wanted. DMA is all about performance and flexibility, and we needed to be more competitive."
Norm Friedman, VP at Aegis Software, says all the vendor's clients, whether buy side or sell side, are focused on high performance: "Algorithmic trading is pitting machine against machine, and every millisecond counts.... The best algorithm is useless if the order does not arrive in time."