Deutsche Bank announced the launch of its Automated Tool for Orders Management (Atom) enhancement for Autobahn last week. Coupled with a change in Deutsche’s terms of trading whereby the bank commits to deal on its streamed option prices (except in cases of the most manifest error) without re-quote, it looks like competitiveness in electronic options trading is entering a new phase.
Pricing and trading will still be executed within Autobahn but Atom will offer complete order facilities. Option orders may be left in terms of volatility, premium, pips and percentage of notional and can be made contingent on time of day, spot level and other factors.
Deutsche claims Atom, “gives greater opportunity to trade inside the bid/offer spread and ahead of time” and “access to more trading books’ liquidity: Atom allows clients to connect more to Deutsche Bank axes”. It will also allow an order to be placed to include a mark-up over the order parameters.
The change to the terms of trading – what Deutsche calls its “deal done” pledge – is an interesting development. More often problems manifest themselves on request-for-quote (RFQ) systems where the indicated price can show very little relation to the price quoted at deal time.