THETRADETECHFX DAILY from the floor
Preparing for the future : How to upskill your workforce
How can you upskill your traders with the tools and data capabilities needed to help inform trade decisions ? For us it ’ s crucial to encourage the overlap of trading , technology and quant skills . To that end , for several years now we ’ ve placed a lot of focus on internal training on Python - and latterly data science - and that ’ s played an important role in creating this multidisciplinary sweet spot in our internal trading community .
The courses are part of an initiative called develop , which is aimed at upskilling people across the firm , with a particular focus on non-tech teams . It ’ s been a huge success , and I ’ d say now that Python is ubiquitous within Man Group . It ’ s our second most-used language after English .
Secondly , what we ’ ve been trying to do within the firm is democratise access to data . A surprising number of firms either don ’ t know what data they have , it ’ s very difficult to access , or its provenance is unknown . At Man Group a big part of that democratisation initiative has been cataloguing all the front office data assets , ensuring their provenance is known , and making them easily accessible - into Python - via a simple API . Of course , we need to make sure that both external and internal data is accessible only to the people it should be , so permissions are key here too . Finally , we ’ ve spent a lot of effort making
Gary Collier , chief technology officer of Man Alpha Technology , talks to LAURIE MCAUGHTRY about how to upskill traders with the tools they need to future-proof their desk – and why early investment in technology is so important .
sure that Python and data are brought together in an easily accessible coding environment . Now , anyone in the firm can just go to a browser and type http :// python / to launch this .
What top trends are you seeing within trading technology that are impacting the FX space ? The FX space is an interesting one to consider in terms of trading tech trends because compared to areas like electronic credit trading , it ’ s really quite mature – for example we ’ ve had livestreamed quotes across FX counterparties for many years now .
That said , technology in the FX space has continued to grow in importance over the last two decades , and we ’ ve seen buy-side firms develop in-house algos in addition to external bank-provided algos to assist in benchmarking execution through algo wheels . This has led to a small technology race in the automation of outdated trader functions .
We ’ re now looking at ways to build on this ; collecting data on market impact , last look and execution round trip times to really drill down into what is the true all-in best price . I ’ d add that we think FX options are on the cusp of greater change too , like we saw in FX spot back in the early 2000s , where orders are overlayed via algorithmic execution to achieve better execution for our clients . We think this could be a significant growth area for FX in the next few years .
We see FX trading , ultimately , as entirely automated . From both an execution and position management point of view ; using varying degrees of position rationalisation combined with some machine learning techniques will enable us to hold positions at differing points on the forward curve , this all being carried out via automated techniques .
As a firm we ’ re driving some frontier
22 THETRADETECHFX DAILY