Vol 1 No 2
CONNECTIVITY
InTrade Plans to White-Label AthenaTrader
NEW YORK—InTrade, a proprietary statistical-arbitrage trading firm in New York, is planning to increase its use of the AthenaTrader system from Aegis Software, extending the platform to clients as a hosted, white-labeled service, as well as connecting to futures markets, an official tells DWT.
Currently, the firm uses AthenaTrader for trading in listed and over-the-counter securities on the INET, ArcaEx and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) markets, says Mark Frank, managing member.
"We will continue to expand on the system to incorporate futures trading and Level II quotes," Frank says. "We plan on beginning to expand our arbitrage operation to CME [Chicago Mercantile Exchange] Globex products like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 e-mini futures."
Aegis, which plans to certify with CME in June, will support a direct price feed from CME, "which is an advantage, because a third party is one extra hop," Frank says. "A raw feed from CME is more robust."
In about three months, pending NYSE approval, InTrade plans to offer AthenaTrader on a hosted, application service provider (ASP) agency basis to its clients, Frank says.
InTrade installed AthenaTrader in December 2003, replacing undisclosed former vendors. Frank says his firm was mainly drawn to the platform because of Aegis’ good reputation in the FIX and the Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC’s) Common Message Switch (CMS) protocols.
"We also like that we can set up our own rules in Java, to direct how orders are generated and keep track of positions and risk in real time," Frank adds.
InTrade deploys AthenaTrader on Sun Microsystems Solaris 8.0 on the server side and Microsoft Windows 2000 on the client side. There are three AthenaTrader users at InTrade.
Aegis also supports Linux and all-Windows implementations.
Further down the road, Aegis, best known for its certification and testing businesses, plans to expand the asset classes supported by AthenaTrader, says Norm Friedman, vice president at Aegis.
In the second half of this year, AthenaTrader will support foreign exchange (FX) in order to support client demand for pairs trading. Aegis has not yet determined which venues it will support, Friedman says.
"If our client is trading BP against Exxon, which are quoted in two different currencies, when they do the hedge there is an FX component that needs to get executed at the same time, in the same strategy," Friedman says.
In the same timeframe, Aegis plans to release a Microsoft .Net adapter for clients that prefer not to work directly in Java.
Daniel Safarik
