Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced Monday that it had added four electronic options algorithms to its algorithmic trading platform.
The four options clean sweep, hidden sweep, iceberg and NBBO sweep complement the company's existing options and stock-specific algorithmic strategies designed for institutional equity and options traders, as well as broker-dealers.
Clean sweep is designed to exhaust hidden and displayed liquidity and then post residuals; hidden sweep sweeps the market when an order is marketable; iceberg is a synthetic reserve order that lets traders designate how much of an order should be displayed when posting to the market, and NBBO or national best bid and offer sweep is an order type that selects exchange based on NBBO. An order will shift to a sweep strategy based on displayed liquidity.
The options algorithms are available directly from Bank of America Merrill Lynch's proprietary platforms InstaQuote and ML X-Trade, its proprietary FIX API, as well as from third parties, including Bloomberg, ConvergEx's Eze OMS, Derivix and RealTick, a unit of Townsend Analytics Ltd.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch said it has seen substantial annual growth in its market share of electronic trading.
