Dash Financial Technologies will release its newly rebuilt front end, dubbed Blaze 7, in Q4 of this year, and it will feature a new volatility trading product suite.
Blaze Classic—or just Blaze, as the Street knows it—is an order execution management system (OEMS) in the options space inherited by Dash during its merger with LiquidPoint in 2017. Dash chief operating officer, Stino Milito, says the company has spent the last couple of years rebuilding the platform to modernize it, make it easier to use, and create a more lightweight deployment system.
Volatility trading tools are “an area—and the only area if I’m being honest—that we haven’t competed in the options space, historically,” Milito says.
Last year, Dash launched its Vega Trader, in which an options trader can pre-set the amount of vega (the risk measure of an option’s sensitivity to price changes in its underlying asset) they want to buy in a given time period and on which strikes (fixed prices at which the option’s underlying security can be bought or sold). The Vega Trader algorithm takes the order and manages it for the trader, buying up the desired amount of vega over those strikes. Among other offerings that will be upgraded is support for delta-hedged orders. These, along with other new volatility tools, will be re-launched in a more cohesive package, Milito says.
The OEMS space has seen a fair amount of upset in recent years. Bloomberg left the arena when it shuttered its Sell-Side Execution and Order Management Solutions (SSEOMS) last year. London-based Fidessa saw an exodus of roughly a quarter of its global workforce, following its acquisition by Ion Group in 2018, the same year that State Street bought Charles River Development, which owned another major buy-side, front-end OMS. In 2017, it was speculated that Bloomberg’s Tradebook was also headed for the exit, though that hasn’t panned out. Today, other tech vendors like Itiviti are seeking to capitalize on exits and shifts by signing displaced or dismayed customers to its own platform.
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