FTC Capital GmbH, a leading European managed futures firm, has successfully moved from manual to automated, electronic trading, greatly simplifying their internal workflow and streamlining operations. Based on 4th Story’s advanced suited of automated trading and analysis products, FTC’s new electronic trading infrastructure has helped it gain efficiencies and reduce risk.

The Vienna-based FTC evaluated a number of vendors and selected 4th Story “because it offered the best design and unmatched flexibility,” said Gerald Fischer, FTC’s Director of Software Development.

Like many firms, FTC had to choose between building a solution themselves or basing it on a third party product. “We initially thought we would be better off not developing it all ourselves. Based on our experience with 4th Story, we are convinced that this was the right way to go,” Fischer stated.

That is not to say that FTC’s staff did not have a hand in tailoring their solution. “4th Story provided a very good and flexible base, but we of course added our specific trading logic and some custom operational features. This really helped us create an operational environment that was our own, rather than having to fit into a vendor's model of one,” he continued.

For example, while FTC used 4th Story to automate signal generation and order formation, some of their orders still needed to be submitted manually due to broker requirements. Explained Fischer, “4th Story worked with us to create custom hybrid order manager module for their product that let us fit these manual orders seamlessly into our workflow. The manual orders work alongside the automated DMA orders that their product also manages for us, so we have all of the order generation and execution in one place.”

He added that 4th Story’s impact extends beyond automated execution. “4th Story also helped us improve our risk management by allowing us to closely monitor trade and position size limits,” said Fischer.

FTC’s overall experience, including its ongoing relationship with 4th Story, has been very positive, concluded Fischer. “Their support is very flexible and responsive, which has accelerated our time to market,” he said.

About 4th Story (www.4thstory.com)

4th Story, LLC’s suite of automated trading and analysis products help brokers, hedge funds and institutional traders get their trading ideas to market quickly and efficiently. Multi-asset and multi-currency capable, the products provide rapid testing and implementation of arbitrarily complex quantitative, algorithmic and automated strategies and analyses, all backed by unparalleled support