The Athena product is being used by the bank to service its buy side clients as well as its own desks. It is designed to offer direct market access (DMA) capability to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Archipelago and other trading markets.
Initially, the service will only support equities but Daiwa said it is planning to add connectivity to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in the next few months.
DMA is all about performance and flexibility, and we needed to be more competitive, said Michael Mollemans, head of electronic execution sales at Daiwa. The Athena software allows us to map client-specific FIX messages into native exchange formats with a minimum of latency.
Athena will also provide administrative and reporting tools in an effort to enable the bank to improve its customer service.
Today, every one of our clients, whether buy side or sell side, is focused on high performance, said Norm Friedman, vice president at Aegis Software. Algorithmic trading is pitting machine against machine, and every millisecond counts…The best algorithm is useless if the order does not arrive in time.
