Bats Global Markets (Bats:BATS) and TRAFiX, a fintech company and innovator in next-generation Order and Execution Management Systems, today announced TRAFiX will offer access to the Bats Auction Mechanism (BAM), launched last year on the exchange group’s EDGX Options Exchange.
BAM is an options auction process that provides Members with an opportunity for price improvement for the Member’s client orders. The BAM functionality alerts all Members at the start of an auction in order to maximize the price improvement opportunity and allows agency orders to trade against the contra party specified by the initiating Member or other Members responding to the auction.
Mutual customers of TRAFiX and Bats can now seamlessly facilitate their clients’ agency order flow by broadcasting their orders via the TRAFiX Order and Execution Management Systems.
Kapil Rathi, Senior Vice President, Options Business Strategy at Bats, said:
As Bats moves to serve customer needs beyond our market-leading price-time priority exchange BZX, functionality like BAM becomes a natural evolution for EDGX. We are deeply committed to the U.S. Options market and are glad firms like TRAFiX share our enthusiasm.
Michael Ottrando, Managing Director and Head of Sales at TRAFiX, added:
We are very excited to announce our FIX integration with Bats’ BAM functionality. Providing our customers with the ability to participate directly with BAM via TRAFiX frontends further expands on our increasingly robust, broker-neutral options trading functionality.
BAM runs continuously throughout the trading day solely on EDGX, the pro-rata Bats’ options market launched in November 2015.
Bats set a new annual market share record of 11.1% for its U.S. Options business in 2016, up from 9.6% in 2015.