The TRADE 60 | Page 66

[ I N - D E P T H | A R T I F I C I A L sense,” said Ian Mawdsley, head of buy-side trading for EMEA and APAC at Refinitiv, during a webinar hosted by The TRADE in March. “The reality is that we have been using both of these processes [AI and ML] for some time. If we look at algo trading supplied for the sell-side in particular, much of that 66 // TheTrade // Summer 2019 I N T E L L I G E N C E ] was formed in the first place to automate some of the more menial tasks sales traders were perform- ing. That has now been taken to the next level where people are looking at price discovery and liquidity discovery.” Further to this, looking at the practical applications of AI and ML, an area that has been of partic- ular interest to the buy-side is the algo wheel, or broker selection processes. While an algo wheel is technically a form of AI, it is on the more basic, rules-based end of the spectrum, but it does provide a solid foundation to build upon. JP Morgan Asset Management has homed in on this space and produced a framework, known as STARS (Systematic Trading Algo- rithm Recommendation System), which aims to optimise the way in which traders choose algorithms using ML technology. According to the firm’s global head of equity trading automation and execution, Ashwin Venkatraman, the vast amounts of data now accessible in the market underpins and is at the heart of implementing these new tools on the trading desk. “We've had [STARS] since 2017, we've had 90% of our algorithm