Nomura expands electronic trading platform in Asia-Pacific

Nomura has announced the launch of two electronic trading products to enhance its clients' equity trading needs: Nomura Cross (NX) and SmartDMA for the Japanese market.

NX Interactive Crossing Network
Nomura went live with Nomura Cross (NX) in Japan in the third quarter of 2009, for stocks that are tradable on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Osaka Securities Exchange and Jasdaq Securities Exchange. NX is Nomura's global crossing network, aggregating liquidity across the firm, clients, and trading partners. The NX platform facilitates crossing of institutional order flow including single stock work orders, program trading, electronic trading services and principal trading.

By crossing orders in NX, clients can benefit from both anonymity and price improvement. Orders placed in NX will not be displayed externally or internally, allowing participants to place orders without revealing information, thereby minimizing market impact. NX will provide clients with the opportunity for price improvement by accessing a central pool of liquidity formed by Nomura's agency and principle order flow and crossing orders within the bid-ask spread published on the primary exchange. The orders matched in NX will be reported through Japan's exchange-provided crossing systems: ToSTNeT, J-NET, and JASDAQ.

SmartDMA
SmartDMA is a new ModelEx strategy in Japan that sweeps NX and other off-exchange trading venues for available liquidity before routing orders to Japan's primary exchanges. SmartDMA optimizes execution quality by aggressively sweeping liquidity from dark venues and both sweeping and posting liquidity to lit venues. Advanced Smart Order Routing (SOR) logic, which is the core of the SmartDMA strategy, is a proven component of Nomura's execution technology which has been live and in use in Europe to enhance its clients' overall trading performance.

Rob Laible, Managing Director and head of Electronic Trading Services, Asia-Pacific, commented: "The launch of NX and SmartDMA represent critical steps forward for our Asia-Pacific equities platform and provide compelling reasons to transact with Nomura. We have tremendous order flow that will now be harnessed in one place, at a given point in time, resulting in cost savings from reduced spreads, better performance, and overall lower market impact costs for our clients."

Adding to this, Ross Whittaker, Product Manager for NX Asia Pacific, commented: "We are committed to product innovation and the delivery of solutions that enable our clients to achieve 'best execution.' The release of these products in Japan illustrates the focus that we are placing upon the ongoing expansion of our electronic trading suite throughout the region."