In product development, everything centers around the problem you're solving.
As the lead product manager for SS&C’s RealTick EMS, that problem lives in the fast-paced world of trading.
Traders’ worlds move fast. They’re managing risk, monitoring volatile markets and executing trades—often with limited resources to meet growing demands. Many traders work on desks where headcount hasn’t kept pace with trading volumes or complexity.
My focus is building technology that empowers traders to perform at their best, and I find real satisfaction in creating tools that make their work smarter, faster and more effective.
However, while trading technology has a lot to offer, traders often don’t have the time to fully explore how it can help them.
To change that, I recently wrote a detailed article on automated trading for The TRADE.
The goal of the article is to demystify automated trading, helping firms understand what it is, how it works and how it can help them scale and reduce risk.
More importantly, the article shows how trading technology empowers traders to focus on the parts of their job that make the biggest impact.
Here are some highlights from the article:
The Basics: What is Automated Trading?
Automated trading exists to help traders work smarter and faster, with greater precision.
Think about how a trader spends their time. How much of their day is spent handling “low-touch” orders – those straightforward, highly liquid, big-name stocks that don’t require much oversight?
If the answer is more than a few moments each day, it is cutting into time better spent on the more complex, “high-touch” trades that are less liquid, come in large blocks or have the potential to move the market. Working these trades requires more time, discretion and focus, sometimes taking days to complete.
By automating routine trades, traders can free up their time and mental bandwidth to focus on the things that really make a difference.
How It Works: You Set the Rules, Automated Trading Executes Them
A smart rules engine is at the core of automated technology. This engine evaluates each trade to see if it meets specific criteria—like size, stock type, market cap, volume or time of day—and, if it does, routes it to market automatically.
Firms set their own rules and safeguards and can adapt them as market conditions change. Many also use an algo wheel, which helps distribute trades across brokers based on factors like cost, performance and execution quality—keeping things efficient and balanced.
Beyond saving time, automated trading reduces the risk of human error and limits the need to resolve discrepancies manually. Built-in checks and controls ensure that questionable trades get flagged or stopped if market conditions shift unexpectedly.
The Way of the Future: Trade Automation Elevates the Trader’s Role
Today, automated trading commands a substantial and growing share of everyday volume. How do you know if your firm is ready to make the leap?
Most firms start small, automating a select set of trades to test their strategies, validate rules, and build confidence before scaling. It’s a practical, low-risk path to adoption that builds familiarity and trust in the process.
As traders become more comfortable with automation tools, they quickly see how the technology relieves the strain on the trading desk and enhances their ability to perform efficiently.
In the end, trade automation amplifies the impact of the trader, helping them scale efficiently, streamline operations and focus on the high-value decisions that truly drive investor value.
Uncover the Real Value of Automated Trading
Automated trading exists to help traders reach peak performance. But that only happens when the technology is developed to be smart, dependable and attuned to the realities of traders’ needs.
RealTick is a global, broker-agnostic advanced execution management system. The EMS offers investment firms centralized access to aggregated liquidity and tools for dynamically managing positions, portfolios and trading risk across global equities and derivatives, fixed income and digital assets.
The fully native automated trading engine allows traders to automate their low-touch flow safely with advanced order routing conditions, allowing them to focus on complex trades.
To dive deeper into the value of automated trading, read my article on The TRADE. And learn how RealTick’s technology supports the needs of today’s modern trading desks.
