Patent Grant
7363268
The present invention is directed generally to computerized trading systems and more particularly to a method and apparatus for anonymous trading wherein an individual offer is made available only to a subset of the available counterparties.
In many computerized trading systems, the participants (individual traders or institutions) are qualified in advance by an exchange and each offer is broadcast from one participant to all other qualified participants.
When the subject of the trade is a commodity (such as wheat or copper) or a financial instrument (such as Treasury Bills or foreign currency), multiple offers for the same commodity or instrument are conventionally ranked by price per unit. Depending on the trading conventions in effect, offers at the same price may be further ranked by size and/or time in a queue of available offers; however, for any given commodity or financial instrument, only one offer is at the head of an associated queue.
Under many market conditions, “market makers” (institutions and/or individual traders whose open offers are available to other traders) will set a price at or slightly above the best price currently available, with the expectation that their offer will reach the head of the relevant queue in due course. However, if there is a sudden change in market conditions, the market maker may wish to cancel or modify his outstanding offer before it reaches the head of the queue. To that end, it is known to warn the trader responsible for an open quote when his quoted price is equal to the best price currently available and/or when his offer reaches the head of queue. Similarly, if the maker's quote was ready to be accepted (ie, it is the highest ranked quote in the system) but is subsequently bettered by another maker, the original maker may be given an opportunity to revise his offer or remove it from the market.
In the traditional voice broker foreign exchange market, the broker announces “Your bid” to a market maker when the maker's own quote is at the head of the queue; the broker also (optionally) announces and/or cancels that quote when someone else submits a better price.
In an anonymous electronic brokerage system such as the EBS system or Reuters 2000-2 in which individual trades of foreign currency are settled directly between two banks (or “trading floors”) rather than through an exchange or a clearing house, the identity of the parties is kept confidential until an offer from one party has been matched to a bid from another party and the matching criteria include not only price, but also the existence of bilateral credit between the two parties. Thus, unlike a traditional voice broker who processes only one quote at a time. (typically the first offer in the queue) and who provides both parties with an opportunity to accept or reject a potential trade after the parties have already been identified, a computerized matching process is able to perform many tasks concurrently and to use objective matching criteria (such as preestablished counterparty credit limits) without divulging any confidential credit information. Moreover, at least the known EBS system operates in a credit screened market in which a price is not offered to a potential counterparty unless it is “Dealable”—ie, each party to the potential transaction has previously indicated a willingness to deal with the other party. Thus there is no longer a single queue for a given currency, but a separate logical queue (typically containing only a subset of the open quotes for each trading floor). Accordingly, the known EBS system displayed an active quote on the maker's terminal in a red background (a so-called “Red Quote”) if that quote was either the best Dealable (or the best regular size Dealable) quote on at least one trading floor, ie, the quote was at the head of some floor's queue of “Dealable” quotes, thereby providing the maker with a signal that his quote has the potential of being about to be accepted. In addition to the visible warning (the quote is displayed on a red background), the EBS voice says “Your bid/offer” and the background of the key fields on the transaction panel turns from yellow to red. Preliminary versions of the EBS system also provided an indication if a quote was “joined” with a Red Quote, ie was in the Dealable queues of at least one trading floor and was equal to the best price that was Dealable to that floor, but was not at the head of the Dealable queue on any trading floor, and thus did not qualify as a Red Quote.
However, as a result the lack of credit between many possible pairs of trading partners and the fact that market makers are reluctant to make an offer that is substantially worse than the best price that is currently available, almost every quote is at the head of the queue on at least one trading floor, and thus the indication that a quote was Dealable on at least one trading floor had limited practical value.
A quote that lost its red status (as indicated by the transaction panel fields turning from red to yellow) is said to be “bettered”. If the “Cancel When Bettered option” in the trader profile is set, such a bettered Red Quote was automatically canceled by the EBS system.
More recent versions of the EBS system have also included a capability for aggregating a regular size (typically US$10 Million) Dealable quote from several quotes for smaller quantities to display a synthetic “regular” size Dealable price whose individual components had priority in time and/or price over any other available quotes. In that case, the “regular Dealable price” would be equal to the worst priced component of the aggregated deal.
For each quote entered into the system by a market maker, the system determines if it is waiting to be “hit” (about to be accepted) at a substantial number of trading floors, and if so, notifies the trader originating the quote.
In accordance with one aspect of the invention, the substantial number of floors is preferably expressed as greater than a predetermined percentage of the available trading partners with whom credit has been established on a bilateral basis, and is preferably greater than 25%.
In accordance with another aspect of the invention, a quote is considered about to be accepted at a particular trading floor if it would be included as a component in an order at the Regular Dealable price currently available to that trading floor.
In accordance with yet another aspect of the invention, the system provides the market maker with a quantitative indication as to how many trading floors (or percentage of available trading partners) are about to accept his quote, and/or how good his quote must be to be Hittable by a given number of trading floors (or percentage of available trading partners).
Other objects and features of the present invention will be apparent from the following description of a presently preferred embodiment taken in connection with the accompanying drawings, in which:
The Arbitrator node ARB computes and maintains the status of all open quotes and sends QtePosition messages to the maker's Mark Access Node (bank node) MAN signaling any changes in the status of a quote. If a trader uses the Cancel When Bettered option, the QtePosition message also can be used by the bank node MAN to determine when his quote needs to be canceled.
Upon receiving the QtePosition message, the maker's bank node MAN sends the QtePositionWS message to the Workstation WS. The Workstation then processes the QtePositionWS message, updating the quote status display (
The processing of the QtePosition and QtePositionWS messages may be conventional and unchanged from prior versions of the EBS system. In particular, when the status of an active quote on the Maker's Transaction Panel (
A quote is “Hittable” from a trading floor, if a regular size hit from that floor would be automatically matched with some part of the quote. In the described embodiment, a quote is “red” if it is Hittable from more than the specified percentage of the trading floors which have bilateral credit with the submitter of the quote. The percentage is a global system parameter, with a default value of 25%.
Suppose that the regular amount is 10M and that the following bids are available (Dealable) to a trading floor X (ranked by decreasing price and then by increasing time of submission): Note that in foreign currency trading, the price is conventionally expressed in “pips” [least significant digits of base currency for a predetermined quantity of local currency], that the amount is conventionally expressed in millions of US dollars, and that a quote can be either a single sided bid to buy the local currency, or a single-sided offer to sell the local currency, or a two-sided bid and offer [separated by a spread].
The first three bids are Hittable from floor X, while Bid 4 is not.
Bid 3, for example, is Hittable from floor X because a regular size hit (Sell 10 M at 20) from that floor would match a part (2M) of that bid. If Bid 3 is Hittable from enough floors (25% of the trading floors which have bilateral credit with Floor C), then Bid 3 is red at the maker's transaction panel.
Reference should now be made to
As part of the startup process, the Arbitrator reads (block 100) the parameter PctFloorsRedQte from the Arbitrator section of the GLOBAL.DAT file. This is the partner floor percentage determining whether a quote is red.
In known fashion, the Arbitrator maintains (block 102) for each trading floor that is currently logged into the network, a queue in the form of a linked list of pointers to atomic data objects (individual quotes), with each queue being ordered by price and time and the objects in the queue being those quotes that are currently available to that trading floor. The queues are updated each time a new quote is received or its status is changed (it has been accepted or withdrawn, or it has been tentatively matched pending credit verification and acknowledgment by both parties) (Quote/Hit branch from decision block 104) and each time the bilateral credit status between any two trading floors changes (Credit branch from decision block 104).
In addition, in accordance with the present invention, for each quote Q, the Arbitrator uses the data in the trading floor queues to maintain (block 106) a respective count of floors HQ from which the quote can be hit by a regular size buy/sell request (typically ten million US dollars).
The Arbitrator also maintains in known fashion (block 108) a credit availability matrix containing the bilateral credit status between each pair of trading floors that are currently connected to the system, which is then used to update the quote queues for any affected trading floors (block 102). In accordance with the present invention, for each floor F, the Arbitrator also uses the data in the credit availability matrix to maintain (block 110) the count of its partners PF (i.e., other floors that have bilateral credit with the given floor).
The Arbitrator thus is able to dynamically adjust both counts (HQ and PF) in response to any trading or credit messages, and determine (block 112) for each quote whether the quote's HQ-count is higher than a predetermined percentage (defined initially as 25%) of the PF-count for the floor that submitted the quote. The result of this test is stored with the other data concerning that particular quote (block 114), and if the Red Quote status has changed, the QtePosition message is transmitted to the trading floor's bank node MAN (block 116).
The above operations may be clarified with a few numerical examples.
When PctFloorsRedQte=25 (current default value) and P=195, then a quote is red if it is Hittable from more than (195*25)/100=4875/100=48 floors. This illustrates that the above definition of red status requires a strict inequality.
When PctFloorsRedQte=25, and P=4, then a quote is red if it is Hittable from more than (4*25)/100=100/100=1 floors.
When PctFloorsRedQte=0, a quote is red if it is Hittable from one or more floors. Thus, with this setting of the global parameter, the above definition of Red Quote is very similar to that used in the known EBS system.
When PctFloorsRedQte=100, no quote is ever red. All active quotes should appear “yellow.”
From the foregoing description and examples, it should be apparent that the Red Quote status, as defined above, depends on both the ranking of the quote relative to other quotes in the market and on the bilateral credit relationship of the submitting floor with other floors, and that the Arbitrator ARB dynamically re-computes the Red Quote status of quotes any time that any of these factors is affected (due, for example, to better prices being submitted or new credit being granted by another floor).
As also shown in
It should be apparent that the ratio HQ/PP and the numerical price indication SP will change at a greater frequency than the Red Quote status RIY. Accordingly, In a system having Market Distributor nodes MD as shown in
Doubtless, other variations on the concepts underlying the present invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art.
This is a continuation of application Ser. No. 09/029,181, filed Jun. 15, 1998, now allowed, which is based upon PCT International Application No. PCT/US96/14086, filed Aug. 28, 1996, which claims priority to Provisional Application No. 60/002,856, filed Aug. 28, 1995.
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| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60002856 | Aug 1995 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 09029181 | US | |
| Child | 09707824 | US |
