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JonesTrading opened an office in Charleston, South Carolina last month and has hired a sales and trading team there to cover the European trading hours, according to Will Geyer, president and COO of the institutional agency brokerage firm. Traders will get in at 2:20 a.m. EST and work until 11:00 am EST.
"Our first move is to solidify coverage of our accounts there for trading in the EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa), " explained Geyer in an interview with Advanced Trading. JonesTrading hired Scott Hirshorn, formerly of ABN AMRO, to lead the international sales trading team. With 13 offices around the country, JonesTrading chose Charleston for the international expansion "because that's where the people wanted to be," said Geyer.
JonesTrading will initially focus on U.S. accounts that are trading internationally. While Jones has London brokerage certification, it will be trading through brokers and executing through third party technology to trade directly from the desktop, he said. It plans to provide its customers with 24/6 execution services in Europe, Asia and Canada, according to the release. Geyer said he plans to hire an Asian markets coverage team in the states as well.
Fidessa modified the US trading platform to help JonesTrading expand into European markets without installing a new system. "They said they wanted to move into international service, and we tweaked that service to what Jones needed and that's what they went live with in May," commented David Polen, SVP of Hosted Product Marketing at Fidessa in an interview with Advanced Trading. JonesTrading has used Fidessa's hosted product for US trading for many years. "The global platform is able to recognize the symbology in the regions and to bridge the order handling instructions that we use today into the foreign markets, said Geyer.
The fact that "Fidessa was able to embed global functionality in the U.S. trading platform including market data and handled all the symbology for foreign equities was the big deal," said Geyer. Because Fidessa has built global ticker plants that access more than 100 exchanges and incorporates the symbology used on different exchanges, it can seamlessly take an order in from the US and match it to the SEDOL numbers used in European markets, according to Polen. "We can price it and show you the Level I and Level II (prices) around it," said Polen. "And we have lots of back office connections and receiving brokers in the local markets," he added. JonesTrading could utilize the international service to execute large baskets of international stocks as well as US, Canadian and Asian stocks, noted Polen.
One advantage of using the US system for international trading is that Jones can leverage FIX connections to buy-side clients. "One of the hidden costs of global trading is buy-side connectivity," said Polen. If you have a client that sends you domestic and international orders, you don't want to have to pay for two FIX connections. They're saving on that," said Polen.
Further expanding its international capability, JonesTrading opened up a Canadian brokerage in the last two months ago in Toronto and is going to utilize the Fidessa Canadian Trading Platform. That platform will go live later in 2009. When that happens, the US system will be enabled to support Canadian orders from US buy-side clients. Buy-side clients that already have a relationship with Jones in the US and want to trade Canadian stocks, can send orders down the same FIX connections to Jones in the US and that will order will seamlessly get to the Canadian Jones traders, explained Polen.
