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Faced with an increasingly volatile market environment, mounting challenges associated with managing an avalanche of data and the never-ending search for higher returns, the need for adaptability, transparency and innovation has become essential for the overall expansion of algorithmic trading globally. The world of algorithms has evolved quite dramatically from its days of simple rules-based execution systems to the current reality of firms leveraging the latest advancements in technology and sophisticated models to stay one step ahead of the competition. With emerging innovation around quantum computing and federated learning models, continued transformation in algorithmic trading has become fundamental to the resilience of financial markets.
Fighting against potential commoditisation, algo strategies are continuously being refined by enabling data scientists and quantitative analysts to collaborate with traders more effectively, while ensuring strategies remain interpretable and appropriately transparent, so that they can be properly validated across different market structures and regulations.
A far cry from the last two years of stagnant growth, The TRADE ' s 2025 Algorithmic Trading Survey appears to show a revival of sorts, harking back to the pre-pandemic years of aggressive adoption and excitement surrounding the latest innovations in strategy development and implementation. The geographic distribution of long-only managers in this year’ s survey was very similar to past years in terms of ratio with traders from the UK( 28 %) and Europe
A resurgence driven by innovation and market adaptation
After recent years of stagnation, The TRADE’ s Algorithmic Trading Survey records a resurgence of growth, fuelled by innovation in strategy development and implementation, as long-only firms navigate increasingly complex and volatile markets.
( 50 %) dominating the pool of respondents. However, there was a decent increase in the number of respondents from North America compared to the previous years at 14 %. The biggest increase actually occurred under the geographical category of ' rest of the world ', which came in at close to 3.5 %, almost 4.5 times higher than in 2024. And the result has been a more diversified global view into algorithmic trading. In terms of asset classes, equities continues to dominate, with over 96 % of all long-only managers responding to the survey trading equities. The percentage of other instruments traded electronically remain on a par with last year: ETFs( 58 %), fixed income( 36 %), FX( 35 %), listed derivatives( 39 %) and crypto( 3 %).
Rating algo performance Ratings of algorithmic trading providers from longonly respondents increased significantly in this year’ s survey, marking an end to the past few years of consistent declines. Survey results show algorithm users provided an overall rating of 6.00 in 2025, a substantial increase from the survey average of 5.81 in 2024,
58 // TheTRADE // Q1 2025