• Mike Schutt, Global Head of Trading Fox River Execution at SunGard’s Global Trading


• 26.05.2015 08:00 pm

Financial IT speaks with Mike Schutt, Managing Director/Head of Trading SunGard’s Fox River Execution Solutions about the company’s flagship product designed by traders and for traders.

Q:  It’s nice to meet you Mike.  What is the name of the product you wish to showcase during the interview?              

A:  Our flagship product - Fox River Execution Solutions (“Fox River”)

Q: Please describe the functionality of Fox River

A: Fox River provides award-winning electronic execution trading -solutions to help clients achieve best execution and overcome market fragmentation.

Fox River uses proprietary trading signals to generate extremely short-term micro alpha which is then used to power various trading strategies to execute clients’ orders.

Q: What are the benefits of the product to end- users?

A:  The client receives a product that strives to achieve better prices for their underlying portfolios.  Also, the trader has flexibility to use the alpha in several different strategies through the use of front-end tickets within their execution management system (EMS) which are fully customizable to meet their needs. Fox River provides independent trading and technical support from pre-open to post-close, as well as post-trade analytics to help clients identify opportunities to improve and customize trading results. Fox River also proactively monitors connections and markets to help ensure availability and optimal performance. 

Q: How long does a typical implementation of this product require?

A: Depending on a client’s current OMS/EMS, from several hours to a few weeks

Q: What are user types of the product?

A: Traditional asset managers and pension funds, sell-side firms, and hedge funds.

Q: What are the competitive advantages of your product over rival products?

Fox River strives to achieve better execution prices, customization, and transaction cost analysis (TCA) reporting. Fox River is the result of a collaborative effort between traders, researches and programmers. They quantify and encode over 200 factors into “Trader Logic” and run these factors on over 6,000 stocks and grades and scores the signals the factors generate for each individual stock. New factors are tested and existing factors are refined continuously. While other algorithms produce optimal trade trajectories, Fox River algos optimizes price. Most of the senior management at Fox River have been traders themselves, exchange floor traders, or worked on buy or sell side desks — giving them a unique appreciation of the value of best execution.

Q: How does SunGard position its product in the market against competitors (e.g. price, functionality, speed of implementation etc.)?

A: Fox River helps to provide better performance through better prices on filled orders.

Q: How often is this product upgraded? How are upgrades delivered to existing users?

A: Generally, releases are made weekly with updates (for optimization). Upgrades are automatic and seamless to the client.

Q: In terms of pricing, how users/customers pay for the product (i.e. the fee structure)?

A: We offer them a software license, and/or per share fee.

Q: What are the most important industry-wide trends affecting the market for this product?

A: Increasing demand for clients to unbundle their research and execution providers to obtain best execution:  Fox River has an unbiased business model and has a TCA analytics product which helps buy-side firms analyze vast amounts of data involved with venue analysis to ensure brokers, HFTs or market makers are not gaming their trades.  

Increasing demand for execution performance as customers focus on total cost:  Fox River has consistently been ranked as a best-performing algorithmic execution provider by third-party independent firms (such as Elkins McSherry 2008-2011). Fox River has also won awards from the following: FOW Awards 2013, Wall Street Letter Awards 2014, Waters Sell-side Awards 2014, Wall Street Letter Awards 2015.

SunGard’s Fox River Execution Solutions and SGN brokerage services offered within the United States and Canada are provided by SunGard Brokerage & Securities Services LLC, Member NYSE, FINRA, SIPC.

Additional resources:

http://financialsystems.sungard.com/solutions/trading-network-services/resources/brokerage_videos_fox-river-traders-dilemma

Macquarie Selects SunGard’s Fox River for US Electronic Trading: http://financialsystems.sungard.com/solutions/trading-network-services/trade-order-management/news/2015_foxriver051315

SunGard Named Best Broker-Dealer for Equities in Wall Street Letter Institutional Trading Awards: http://financialsystems.sungard.com/newsroom/newsreleases/2015/cm_wslaward_021015

SunGard Wins Waters’ Sell-Side Technology Awards for Best Trading Network and Best Smart Order Routing Tool: http://financialsystems.sungard.com/solutions/hedge-funds-management/fox-river/news/2014_sgn-fox041614

SunGard Named Best Broker-Dealer for Algorithms in Wall Street Letter Institutional Trading Awards: http://financialsystems.sungard.com/solutions/trading-network-services/trade-order-management/news/2014_wslawards030314

SunGard Wins FOW Award for Asia for Best New Trading and Execution Product: http://financialsystems.sungard.com/solutions/hedge-funds-management/fox-river/news/2013_foxriver092713

Biography

Mike Schutt is the Global Head of Trading with responsibility for all aspects of trading within SunGard’s Fox River Execution Solutions.  Mr. Schutt joined SunGard in 2010 when it acquired Fox River Execution Technology, where he was one of the original founding partners.

Prior to joining Fox River, Mr. Schutt spent ten years at Schonfeld Securities where he became a partner with expertise in short-term trading.  He has many philanthropic interests including work in China and Nicaragua. Mr. Schutt graduated magna cum laude from Western Illinois University with a BS in Finance.  He also holds multiple FINRA licenses including the Series 7, 24, 55 and 63.