OptionsCity To Launch Cloud-based Trading Platform

CityTrader brings advanced functionality, such as custom spread-building and RFQs, with the ease of an online trading platform to a broad audience of active traders and commodity market participants. OptionsCity also announced the availability of City API, a REST-based, easy-to-implement API for accessing futures and options on futures market data and analytics. These solutions together complete OptionsCity’s integration of futures trading technology provider Optionshop, which it acquired last year.

Already, CityTrader and City API have proved to be flexible in their application. TradeStation uses CityTrader to offer additional futures trading capabilities to active traders via the TradeStation Futures+ platform. In another collaboration with Vault Technologies, City API helps power farmers’ daily decisions via Vault Technologies’ Dairy Decision Management Engine.

“We’re constantly improving active trader offerings to help our clients identify more and better opportunities in the market,” said Nicholas LaMaina, Head of Global Equities, Options, and Futures at TradeStation. “So when we thought about expanding those capabilities for futures traders, it was critical that the solution be sleek and flexible, and CityTrader afforded us that flexibility.”

“With CityTrader and City API, we offer a scalable, professional financial technology solution with broad applications in the market – from active futures traders to dairy farmers who want to easily find out how futures can help them maximize profit,” said Hazem Dawani, CEO and cofounder of OptionsCity. “But critically, the solution is highly flexible with a REST-based API that can allow firms to easily create custom tools for futures and options on futures trading.”

For brokerages, futures commission merchants (FCMs) or commodity trading advisors, CityTrader can also be white-labeled as a value added alternative to legacy Windows-based systems and costly in-house platforms.

At Vault Technologies, the company wanted a partner that could offer real-time commodity pricing, connectivity to FCMs, and a view of consolidated positions – all within a simple, custom-built interface.

Brian Rice, Vault’s CEO, added, “Our goal was to create an elegant interface for dairy farmers that gave them an accurate view of their business. The challenge was that the details are very mathematically complex and tied to various futures markets. Not only does OptionsCity have that technological expertise, but it also has a detailed understanding of commodity pricing that makes working together easy.”