AES ®
The difference is signals
All over the world, huge money has been pouring into formerly arcane trading strategies. Stat-arb. quants and high-frequency traders electronically search for buyers and then attempt to get a penny ahead of them. There are now more people and more money than ever deployed in a daily battle against natural order flow. And like a poker player with a tell in Vegas, if you send even subtle signals about your intentions, your performance will be disappointing.
There are two types of signals that broadcast the presence of a buyer or seller: the obvious ones, like a block trader shopping flow on systems like Autex, and the more subtle signals that result from posting bids and offers in naive ways. Both humans and computers are capable of amateurish trading: repetitive behaviors, bids with too much size, orders directly pegged to the quote or the last trade, algorithms that stick to a tighter time schedule than a railroad.
At AES ®, we believe that stealth and unpredictability are tied to trading success. And therefore reducing signals of all types has become a primary goal of our algorithms. You can see it in our trading strategies, in our order placement tactics, and in our tight controls that focus on confidentiality and anonymity. And more importantly you can see it in your executions.
