09:02 AM
Sectoral Asset Management Finds Leasing an OMS Better Than Buying
Sectoral Asset Management, a Montreal-based investment advisory firm, recently began using the application service provider version of LineData's LongView Trading order management system. Why lease versus buy the software? "We're a small boutique firm, we have limited IT resources, and we don't have the resources internally to host or manage trading applications," says Laurent Sicard, IT manager at Sectoral Asset Management.Sicard was looking for two things from the hosted LongView software: integration between the platforms used by traders and portfolio managers, and FIX support. (The Financial Information eXchange Protocol is a series of messaging specifications for the electronic communication of trade-related messages.)
The linking of the portfolio managers to the trading desks has been the greatest benefit of the new system, Sicard says. "Portfolio managers can see the live execution of their orders over the feeds," Sicard says.
Performance of the hosted system has been "very comfortable," Sicard reports. "One way to handle latency is to make sure as little data is moving as possible," says Annie Morris, managing director, North America at Linedata. "We architected our ASP solution to have a very thin client that would not suffer a delay."
Sectoral's next step will be to integrate a post-messaging system directly to the trading and portfolio management platforms. The firm is considering using SSCNet for this.