Choice Spreads
Growth Trends
It has started in Equities and resulted in huge growth. Commission free trading popularised by RobinHood has created legions of traders who have known nothing else but commission free.
Elsewhere in FinTech companies like Revolut attracted so many users via the attraction of free world-wide inter-currency transfers with zero fee.
Brokers are facing ever increasing expectations from consumers on providing tight spreads or commission free trading.
As consumers look to diversify their trading they may be put off by large execution costs.
Please see our Further Growth Trends Growth
Benefits
The benefit of choice spreads is growth and future proofing your business.
Millennials & Generation Z expectations around finance are a factor. These are the growth generations of the future. They have been weened on fee free financial services.
It's a massive marketing tool and should be able to bring lots of new clients into the business.
Risks
You become more vulnerable to systematic abuse with your liquidity provision. The buffer that spread or commission provides help against is removed
Nefarious systematic attacks Nefarious Trading & Pricing
Coordinated trading via EAs / Signals / Following.
lots of orders arriving at the same time pushing the market, particularly in sensitive instruments or illiquid times of day
Sweeping the market
As a broker you're not getting the order. The whole market may be getting a chunk of the same order. Did you get your order first, or are LPs already hedging their risk elsewhere?
Spoofing particular in crosses in illiquid timezones
Machine-gunning, splitting a larger order up into a series of small orders and machine gunning that order in to achieve a VWAP price at the TOB price rather than pay the full VWAP price published in a full order book.
Abuse of incentive schemes
Where users collect the refer a friend / signup bonus by signing up for two accounts who place equal and opposite trades. The user maintains no risk, and collects any incentives.
Systematic abusers. The same people/accounts are popping up the following week as a new account behind a new IP bypassing geo-ip determination and KYC techniques.
Automation for risk profiling becomes increasingly important as the barrier to trading is lowered for users. Reducing time to action in spotting bad accounts and tailoring their liquidity provision
Monetisation
In equities the likes of Virtu and Citadel pay for the flow and the broker's monetise based on payment-for-order flow model. The question to be asked and indeed the SEC is doing so is does this result in the best execution for the client?
In FX there is no single market underpinning a security. Its inherently a distributed market place. So what are the options?
In Crypto, with hundreds of ECNs and market places there is considerable variation in bid/offers with a complicated fee structure making rate normalisation difficult.
Choice via Aggregation?
The problem with aggregation is that it results in poor pricing. Winner's curse is well established. Updating your rate at the pace of your slowest LP i.e. your updating at the pace of the slowest Gazelle when there are Lions about.
Forming your own rate. Predictive models
We thoroughly recommend forming your own rate, using predictive techniques. This allows you to maximise the information available to you.
Execution Strategy
Needs to be coordinated with marketing and user experience. They need to know they are getting an excellent deal.
If they are happy to pay large spreads, and you've moved them on to a choice model, then spread PnL is cannibalised.
If you turned it on for your entire user base without telling them, are they even aware that you are giving them money?
It's not for everyone.
You can't offer the same kind of spreads for large orders, institutional clients, machine-gunners etc.
You'll need automated techniques of identifying bad flow. You'll need to be able to still charge fair spread on larger orders and use judicious liquidity reduction.
Value Add Simulations
We are able to simulate the P&L impact of choice spreads on your flow as part of our Value Add Simulations