Users of ETDs trading platforms have a good choice of excellent platforms, all of which have some key common characteristics. They have customizable homepages. They have boxes where users can see depth in contracts, and click through to trading. They enable clients to send orders in clips or to build portfolios of orders to be released at a certain time, and so on. They are generally also able to receive and send information in the Fix protocol, and they have open APIs.
Aside from JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, Barclays Capital, CSFB, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers offer an excellent service. But finally, the competition came down to Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan, because they both boast an event detection system built by a Cambridge company called Apama, using money invested mainly by the Carlyle Group.
The system is particularly good at inputting stretegies and rules. Clients choose these rules, and then connect them visually, by drawing the strategy, using a graphic display system of boxes and arrows, which makes the process very easy to manipulate.
Both JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank showed us this impressive system, although it is not yet publicly live at Deutsche Bank.