Best independent TCA: Tradefeedr

Tradefeedr brings in the award for best independent TCA provider at the FX Markets e-FX Awards 2022

With a myriad of liquidity providers, trading platforms and venues active in the FX market, measuring the execution quality of market participants’ trades is a complex endeavour that requires capturing a broad set of data and normalising it for use in creating benchmarks. Because data in the FX market is so dispersed, the quality of these benchmarks is only as good as the breadth of the market they capture.

“A problem the FX industry has faced for some time is that nobody has access to enough data to solve the interesting problems,” says Tim Cartledge, chief data officer at Tradefeedr. “There is no single market participant that sees more than 5–10% of the market. And, with internalisation standing at more than 80%, everything’s gone dark.”

This is exactly what FX data analytics provider Tradefeedr is working to shine a light on. The firm receives data from the 15 largest liquidity providers in the FX market and is able to capture a significant part of the market for its 50-plus buy-side clients, against which they can better measure the execution quality of their trades. However, Tradefeedr provides much more than transaction cost analysis (TCA), which is only one of many use cases. The firm also collects data on the execution type and the logic behind each trade, as well as analysis of algos, limit orders and user instructions.

While the scope of the data collected is certainly important, Tradefeedr believes that transparency in the provision of FX data is paramount, and not only leads to better-informed clients, but is the only way to level the playing field in a highly fragmented liquidity landscape. The firm considers that its normalised and unbiased data sits at the core of data quality and, as such, it remains fiercely independent.

To strengthen its offering, Tradefeedr’s co-founder, Alexei Jiltsov, explains that the firm provides its clients with unfettered access to its databases. Indeed, with the use of an application programming interface (API), Tradefeedr clients can connect directly to the underlying market data and use it according to their specific requirements.

“People effectively own their data,” he says. “We allow them to access the data for themselves, but we are also there to help them manage the data with pre-built analytics should they need it. However, many clients want to query all their data themselves, up to the level of individual child fields and construct their own reports.”

To this end, Tradefeedr’s services are geared towards FX clients wanting more than those merely seeking a TCA provider as part of a box-ticking exercise. By focusing on the needs of firms of various sizes, Tradefeedr is confident its products satisfy the requirements of even the most demanding of users.

“Tradefeedr is designed in a way where we don’t control what our clients do with their data, nor do we have any desire to control how they use our API and what they build on top of that,” says Jiltsov. “But, for less sophisticated users, we’ve also created data wrappers to make things more user-friendly.”

Indeed, the vision of Tradefeedr is to serve all players in the market. As such, the firm provides its less experienced clients with different levels of access to its offering depending on their needs. Clients are also able to select from a library of pre-existing analytics templates, ranging from TCA and custom execution policies to liquidity management, as well as receive reports and alerts directly to their inbox without needing to conduct their own advanced analysis.

Tradefeedr does not see itself as purely a provider of TCA, but rather as an open-source data service. With its huge network of market participants and large database of market data, the firm views its role as being a data facilitator between liquidity providers and the buy side.

“We normalise the data we receive from liquidity providers and make it easier for them to deliver this service to their clients on the Tradefeedr platform,” says Jiltsov. “Our vision is to overcome data silos and enable a data-driven dialogue between all market participants.”

 

Tradefeedr was named Best independent TCA provider at the 2022 FX Markets e-FX Awards.

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