When it comes to electronic trading in Europe, the buyside and the sellside don’t always see eye to eye.
A survey just published by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) covering equities trading in Europe found extensive use of technology. But it also noted differences in the viewpoints of brokers and their customers toward various aspects of electronic trading.
Both the buyside and sellside agreed that the adoption of electronic trading is being driven primarily by a desire to lower costs.
They also agreed that the most important reasons for choosing an electronic trading platform were access to sources of liquidity and the range of products offered.
Where they differed was on the relative importance of speed of execution. About 20 percent of buyside respondents said speed was an important issue when choosing a trading platform. Only 2 percent of the sellside cited speed as an important factor.
Speed of execution was also a point of contrast when the topic was improvements to trading platforms. About 11 percent of the buyside wanted faster systems. No firms on the sellside considered faster trades to be a noteworthy goal.
The sellside’s priority, according to the survey, is to increase the number of products on their trading systems. The buyside, by contrast, wants to see improvements across the board. Besides speed, that includes market data and analytics, more asset classes, lower costs and more robust technology.
The survey was conducted for SIFMA by Concise, a British consultancy. It polled 94 buyside traders and nine brokerage firms. It found that half of the buyside respondents deliver the vast majority of their orders to the sellside electronically.
