Boutique Broker-Dealer Makes Veterans Day Month Pledge

Posted on November 1, 2016 by admin

Mischler Financial Group Annual Veterans Day Month Pledge: Three Philanthropic Missions;

Securities Industry’s Oldest SDV-Owned Firm Gives Back and Pays Forward

(AP Newswire) Stamford, CT & Newport Beach, CA –November 1, 2016 —Veterans Day is observed by Americans each year on November 11; the day that is dedicated to honoring and extending our gratitude to the millions of men and women who have served within the US military. At Mischler Financial Group (“Mischler”), the financial industry’s oldest institutional brokerage and investment bank owned and operated by service-disabled veterans, Veterans Day is observed every day, and each November Mischler pledges a percentage of the entire month’s profits to carefully-vetted charitable organizations that support veterans and their families in recognition of this national holiday.

To honor Veterans Day Month 2016, Mischler Financial Group has made a financial pledge to three separate organizations that go above and beyond the call of duty to support military veteran families and local communities. Those 501c3 organizations are Bob Woodruff Foundation, The Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund and Buildon.org.

Stated Dean Chamberlain, Chief Executive of Mischler Financial, a 20-year veteran of the securities industry and a U.S. Military Academy at West Point alumni, “There are now more than 20 million Americans who have served with integrity and honor in the US Armed Forces, yet when transitioning back to civilian roles, too many are encountering challenges as they seek higher ground. The Mischler Financial year-round philanthropic mission is dedicated to the military veteran community at large, and Veterans Day Month provides a special opportunity for our trading desk and our clients to work together to give back and pay forward to the veteran community in ways that can truly help change lives for the better.”

Added Chamberlain, “This past May, we made our Memorial Day Month pledge to crowdfund campaign Veterans Education Challenge, as we believe that advanced education is a core component to both personal and professional success. The organizations that we have pledged our Veterans Day Month support to provide equally unique runways by which veterans can further bolster their knowledge base and self-confidence, and in turn, help them to more easily target and capture opportunities as they advance forward.”

About The Bob Woodruff Foundation (501c3)

Mission Statement: Founded in 2006 by ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff and his wife Lee after Bob was hit by a roadside bomb while covering the war in Iraq. The Bob Woodruff Foundation has led an enduring call to action for people to stand up for heroes and meet the merging and long-term needs of today’s veterans. To date, BWF has invested more than $33 million to find, fund and shape programs that have empowered more than 2.5 million impacted veterans, service members and their families. To learn more, visit their website

About The Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund (501c3)

Mission Statement: Committed to providing support to those most affected by the Global War on Terror. Assistance includes: College scholarships and grants; Financial aid for professional certification programs and non-degree programs; Educational career counseling and mentorship. To learn more, visit their website.

About Buildon.org (501c3)

Mission Statement: To break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy and low expectations through service learning programs in many of America’s most under-resourced high schools. Buildon.org is dedicated to engaging and training high school students in the country’s most challenging urban areas by providing those students with the tools to proactively advance programs that can better the quality of life for members of their communities who are in need. To learn more, visit their website.

About Mischler Financial Group Inc.

Established in 1994, Mischler Financial Group, Inc. (“Mischler”) was the first broker-dealer certified as a Service-Disabled Veteran owned Business Enterprise (SDVOBE).Since that time, Mischler has become widely-recognized by Fortune corporate treasurers, public pension sponsors and the industry’s leading institutional investment managers for “punching above its weight class” while serving as a boutique investment bank and conflict-free institutional brokerage. Mischler is unique among its peers for its capital markets capabilities, as well as the firm’s year-round advocacy and support of veteran-centric causes. Mischler maintains offices in 8 major cities and is staffed by more than 55 securities industry veterans whose expertise extends across virtually all primary and secondary debt and equity capital market silos. In addition to traditional DCM and ECM services and secondary market best execution, Mischler administers corporate share repurchase programs for leading Fortune companies, cash management for government entities and corporations, and asset management programs for liquid and alternative investment strategies. The firm’s website is www.mischlerfinancial.com

For Additional Information:

Attn: Office of the Chief Executive

Email: [email protected]

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MiFID II and The End of Brokers?

Posted on May 6, 2016May 3, 2018 by admin

(TradersMagazine)-The new regulations from MiFID II have a direct impact on the structure of brokerages in Europe. Specifically, MiFID II dictates that all brokerages are required to demonstrate best execution and provide full disclosure and transparency on the following items: price, transaction costs, speed of execution, likelihood of execution, trading venue selection, etc. While these metrics seem to be obvious priorities for investor disclosure that should be adopted by the U.S. regulators as well, these long have been the “secret sauce” of many execution brokers.

Not to mention the other requirement of MIFID II: strict requirements for soft-dollar commissions for research. When I started working on the trading floor, soft-dollar commissions were the way business was done. A quant (me) would generate trading ideas that would be subsequently distributed to the desk’s institutional clients. An example of a trading idea could be the economic rationale for why the futures prices on Canadian dollar were about to rise, and, hence why someone like a treasurer of a business with Canadian exposure would choose to buy the futures now, rather than wait for the quarter end. Clients choosing to trade on the research were invariably charged a spread with the cost of the research idea priced-in, and that was just business as usual.

In addition to the secret sauce that will be spilled by transparency requirements and the tight control of soft-dollar commissions, the last component of traditional brokerage businesses was quality relationship management. Can one differentiate a business by a friendly attitude and a free pint of beer? Of course, yes. However, a client can only drink so much beer on a given day, and the prospect of hanging out with yet another broker can be daunting, to say the least.

So where is the brokerage industry going under the new regulations? Technology is certainly not only enabling the requirements of transparency, it is also leveling the field as far as investors are concerned, making broker-shopping easy. How are brokers to retain their clients?

BrokerDealer.com maintains the largest database of broker-dealers across 35 countries

The answer once again lies with technology. Smart order routing solutions should enable brokers to compete for clients beyond beer outings and popular tickets. A solid example of someone who has been doing this well for the past decade in the U.S. equities is Pragma Securities: leveraging PhD-level research and the technology to deliver benchmark-beating routing to their clients. However, even Pragma cannot fully disclose its secret sauce – doing so would make it vulnerable to competition and likely affect its business considerably.

Irene Aldridge

Irene Aldridge is Managing Director, Head of Research and Development, AbleMarkets.com
and Able Alpha Trading, LTD. She is the author of High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide
to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems. She can be seen at the Big Data Finance
conference at New York University on May 19 and 20, 2016. Irene can also be reached at [email protected].

For the entire column from Traders Magazine, click here

BrokerDealers Merge High-Touch With High-Tech Execution

Posted on September 23, 2015 by admin

Brokerdealers that provide equities execution services to buyside clients are continuing to grapple with a pendulum that during the past years has moved away from high-touch, traditional coverage to high-tech or ‘low-touch’ fully electronic execution services. Now the pendulum is swinging back to the middle ground, as sell-side firms work to merge high-touch and high-tech execution desks to address the evolving needs of institutional clients who want one single point of contact from respective covering brokers.

According to a recent column by John D’Antona Jr. in sell-side industry TradersMagazine, “After years of using a separate and siloed approach to its trading high- and low-touch trading desks, it appears that the brokers are starting to meld the two desks into a single or one-touch trading desk….

The reason? Costs to maintain the two separate groups have risen amid stagnant commission spend, to be sure. But also, U.S. institutional equity investors accept coverage from a single sell-side sales trader for both e-trades and traditional block trades.

Also, since the start of the e-trading era, the buyside has insisted that the two execution channels remain separate and that specialists who monitor their algorithmic trading be distinct from the experts who manage their block orders. The primary reason for this divide: Investors were concerned about information “leakage” and saw this hard separation as key to preserving their anonymity.

Ryan Moran, Mischler Financial Group

Noted Ryan Moran, Director of US Equities Execution for agency-only, institutional boutique Mischler Financial Group, the financial industry’s oldest and largest minority brokerdealer owned and operated by service-disabled military veterans, “Institutional clients have become increasingly fluent as to the benefits of algo-centric tools, which explains why these tools have become pervasive across the trading ecosystem, but as much as all of us appreciate the efficacy of these so-called “low-touch-only” tools, in many cases those who migrated to algo-only have deprived themselves of the long-proven benefits of high-touch execution. We’ve always offered a combination, as a 3-dimensional view that only humans can provide addresses the fiduciary best execution obligations of buyside managers, many of whom oversee public pension funds.”

Added Moran, “Having a single point of contact who provides a consultative approach and is fluent in both practice areas is arguably the best practice within the context of true best execution for those engaged in block trading.”

Among the more than 300 institutions Greenwich Associates interviewed in 2015 as part of its annual study, the quality of execution consultancy saw the greatest increase in importance as a criterion for e-trading among buy-side traders.

However, a new Greenwich Associates report, “Blurred Lines: Sales Traders Drift Toward Execution Consultancy,” shows that a majority of the more than 300 U.S. institutional equity investors participating in the study are now willing to accept single coverage across high-touch and electronic trades. Only a declining 31% of the institutional investors participating in annual Greenwich Associates U.S. Equity Investors Study still prefer separate coverage.

Greenwich pointed to two main changes are driving this shift:

To continue reading this story from TradersMagazine, please click here

BrokerDealer Bent on Best Ex Via Agency-Only

Posted on July 28, 2015July 28, 2015 by admin

Below BrokerDealer blog post is republished courtesy of financial news curator MarketsMuse.com and spotlights institutional broker Dash Financial, a firm that is positioned as being “agency-only” , a phrase that suggests they only act as broker, not as a contra-side principal trader–a role that is typical to many investment bank trading desks.

MarketsMuse dip and dash department frequently prefers spotlighting altruists and do-gooders, including Agency-only execution firms in the brokerdealer sphere who, unlike “principal trading desks”, do not take the contra side to institutional customer orders as a means of making a profit; agency-only firms merely execute those client orders via the assortment of major exchanges and dark pools that traffic in equities and equity options. Today’s spotlight is on Dash Financial; the only position they purportedly take is a business model position by promoting the fact they act as a conflict-free agent only representing the best interest of their institutional brokerage clients in consideration for an agreed-upon commission.

BrokerDealer.com provides a global database of brokerdealers operating in more than three dozen countries throughout the free world.

The phrase “Best Execution” is therefore popular jargon among agency-only firms and implies that customers are receiving ‘the best” execution. What that means is a function of who you ask, particularly when considering the brokerdealer community has proven uniquely adept at capturing hidden revenue via rebate schemes in consideration for orders routed to those respective venues for execution. These schemes are aggressively promoted by the nearly two dozen major exchange and dark pools that facilitate trading in equities and equity options.

Courtesy of our friends at FierceFinance, today’s altruist of the week award goes to equity and options market agency brokerage Dash Financial, who asserts that being a broker in today’s fast-paced market is about being a technology expert and a consultant on clients’ execution objectives.

Below is the extract from FierceFinance’s interview with Dash Financial’s CMO:

David Karat, Dash Financial

“Everything is a tradeoff,” said David Karat, chief marketing officer for Dash Financial. “Every action you take to minimize fees, you risk losing liquidity, and for every technique to maximize liquidity it will cost you more money because it will be less relevant which venues you go to get that liquidity. It’s that balance we sit on top of and consult with our clients on.”

To that end, Dash Financial aims to help clients achieve what it calls on best net execution – execution that incorporates exchanges fees and all other associated costs.

“If there is liquidity in multiple places we are going to capture that liquidity based on the cheapest economics for the client,” Karat said. But Dash Financial has also designed its tracing architecture to couple its best execution algorithms with a focus on in-depth transparency, Karat said.

“We actually want you to see all the child orders, the millisecond time stamp of which destinations we are going to and what happened,” Karat said.

To continue reading the entire story, please visit MarketsMuse.com

For this Best-In-Class BrokerDealer, Its About Best Execution

Posted on August 14, 2014August 14, 2014 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update continues its series profiling the financial services industry’s leading brokerdealers with a snapshot of boutique firm WallachBeth Capital, the agency-only institutional broker specializing in ETFs, Closed-End funds (CEFs), options, and equities research of “under-followed,” but fast growth companies within the healthcare sector.

Below video provides true color and frames the firm’s value proposition in a comprehensive manner. Further below is a Q&A with firm principals Michael Wallach and David Beth, both of whom are 25+ year sell-side trading market veterans and are each considered to be industry thought-leaders by both buyside clients and sell-side peers.

Q. I’m familiar with the term “inter-dealer-broker” aka “IDB”, a broker that serves as intermediary between competing sell-side broker/dealers for the purpose of maintaining anonymity; why does WallachBeth refer to the firm as “inter-market broker.”

Wallach: We go far beyond the typical sell-side boundaries, which is the universe that IDB’s limit themselves to.
Our trading relationships extend not only across the spectrum of competing Tier 1 sell-side facilitation desks, but also includes high-touch prop trading and market-making firms, along with a wide range of hedge funds and other buy-side managers, all of whom actively trade the underlying cash instruments, options, futures, fixed income or commodities that map to the products that we specialize in. Continue reading →