Latest upgrade adds new risk management and fixed income features
CQG, a leading independent provider of trading software, is introducing a new feature that is designed to allow a central trading desk at a futures broker to manage trades for multiple customers.
When a customer tags an order as a "care order," it directs the broker to manage the execution manually. The care order functionality essentially parks the order temporarily, giving the broker an opportunity to review it before execution.
One potential use is for in-house matching of orders. In markets where that type of matching is permissible, the care order feature gives the broker the option to cross the order internally with another customer's account.
Another potential use is for risk management. A size limit can be set so that an order above that limit can be parked automatically, giving the broker's risk management desk time to review the order and determine if the order should be submitted for execution or not.
Troy Wood, the firm's director of FCM and API client relations, explained that the care order functionality can be turned on for all orders or adjusted so it only parks trades that exceed certain parameters. Wood noted that a commercial client asked CQG to add the functionality for its grain trading operation, and the company recognized that it might be useful for other customers concerned about risk management.
CQG also overhauled the platform’s functionality for trading fixed income products including not only interest rate futures but also U.S. Treasury securities. Fixed income traders can now employ future yield, gross basis, and DV01 values in complex yield formulas and then view, chart and trade those formulas. These enhancements were developed based on recommendations from fixed income clients in Chicago, according to Alli Brennan, director of marketing and product management. "We recognized there was a need to overhaul the underlying math to get the calculations to match the way these FI traders expect to see it and provide them a view of these values on the trading interface."
Finally, the firm announced that it plans to move toward a rolling release cycle in addition to its traditional January upgrade. "These projects are finished much sooner than on an annual basis and we wanted to get stuff into customers’ hands faster, we’ve implemented a quarterly pilot release cycle, a production-ready release that we’ll put on the site," Brennan explained.
"We won’t force customers to upgrade to it—that will still stay on an annual schedule—but if they want the new functionality, they are able to take advantage of that much sooner than January or February of 2018," she said.
