PRAGMA @ WEEDEN LAUNCHES DARK POOL LIQUIDITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Posted February 26, 2008

NEW YORK – Weeden & Co., LP, a full-service institutional broker, and Pragma Financial Systems LLC, a quantitative financial software provider, have launched OnePipe, a liquidity management systems built to maximize efficiency and access to non-displayed liquidity in dark pools, addressing liquidity fragmentation. OnePipe has been developed through Pragma @ Weeden, the two firms’ joint algorithmic trading service.

“We were finding that as the dark pool universe grew, our clients were having problems accessing liquidity efficiently and in an intelligent manner,” says Douglas Rivelli, Managing Director at Weeden & Co. “They were targeting a small number of destinations with the highest crossing rates, but missing liquidity at smaller destinations because monitoring every venue was becoming too difficult. We wanted to develop a solution that would expose client orders to the greatest number of passive liquidity sources to give them the greatest chance of trading large blocks with minimal market impact.”

OnePipe offers institutional investors access to more than 25 dark pools, allocating orders among all non-displayed venues based on both historical and trade-date liquidity, without preference to destination or venue fees. OnePipe also manages the rules of each liquidity source, such as minimum share size, resting orders versus pinging, and cross times. In addition, OnePipe has strong anti-gaming logic built in and monitors every liquidity venue for execution quality.

“Dark pools serve an important and beneficial function in our markets, which has led to their proliferation,” says Lee Maclin, Director of Research at Pragma Financial Systems. “The role of OnePipe is to defragment that liquidity and ensure that traders are able to take full advantage of the liquidity present in all of these non-displayed venues.”