Platform provides the deepest level of execution quality insight available for the options market
AUSTIN, TEXAS May 10, 2017 – S3 (“the Company”), a financial services software company providing innovative solutions to monitor and analyze trade execution for options, fixed income securities, and equities, today announced that it has launched its Options Best Execution 2.0 platform for options trade analysis. This cutting-edge platform builds on the Company’s already-robust options offering to provide clients with even more granular and impactful analytics capabilities so that they may better identify, and achieve, best execution.
S3 has been the market leader in options execution analysis for years, and has leveraged its unmatched expertise and best-in-class technology platform to develop Options Best Execution 2.0 based directly on the feedback of its customer base. The platform enables clients to attain more detailed insights on their options orders by analyzing a multitude of different market scenarios, including the ability to compare volume, available liquidity, and spread size across the growing number of available execution venues. Additionally, S3 has incorporated midpoint and spread separation analysis, as well as improved “tweener” reporting. This intelligence is critical for users to more effectively navigate today’s often convoluted market structure, determine the true execution quality of their orders, and adjust their trading strategies accordingly.
Mark Davies, CEO of S3, commented on today’s news, “Options Best Execution 2.0 marks an entirely new era in execution quality analysis for the options market. We are committed to enhancing transparency and the new platform achieves just that. Options Best Execution 2.0 provides significant value to our customer base and furthers S3’s longstanding history of innovation in providing critical execution insight, thereby enabling our clients’ success and improving trust in the securities markets by promoting a fairer trading environment.”
Options execution quality has historically been measured primarily through Effective over Quoted analysis, but S3 has complemented and improved upon this method with the addition of midpoint analytics – an industry first. Utilizing the midpoint as a metric for measuring options execution quality results in data that is less skewed by spread size, which is critical given that options trade spreads continue to widen, particularly in recent years. Additionally, the Options Best Execution 2.0 platform allows customers to determine the execution efficiency of their large options orders by analyzing what percentage of available liquidity they are able to capture, and how much of each order is filled. This depth of analysis provides clients with invaluable summary information on trades with widely varying spread sizes, which is critical for customers to achieve best execution and remain fully compliant with associated regulations.
Mr. Davies concluded, “To provide a deeper level of insight than has historically been available, we have incorporated midpoint, spread and execution efficiency analytics into our Options Best Execution 2.0 platform, among a wide array of other innovative metrics. S3 continues to cement its position as the leading provider of execution quality analytics and regulatory compliance tools not only for options, but also for fixed income securities and equities. We look forward to unveiling additional enhancements to our software platform in the coming months as we constantly strive to provide our customers with the most impactful tools available to navigate today’s complex market structure and achieve best execution.”
For more information please visit: www.S3.com.
About S3
S3 is a financial services software company that provides innovative solutions to monitor and analyze trade execution, facilitate transparency, and simplify regulatory compliance for options, equities, and fixed income securities. The Company’s products are used today by many of the world’s largest financial institutions, broker-dealers, exchanges, bulge bracket and retail banks, and market makers to deliver market structure analytics and best execution reporting. S3 leverages its proprietary software to provide third-party trade verification and optimize trade execution for both the U.S. and Canadian markets.