Charles River Solution and SJ Levinson & Sons Announce Strategic Partnership

On Tuesday morning Charles River, a front- and middle-office investment management solutions provider, announced a partnership with SJ Levinson & Sons. The partnership will leverage SJ Levinson's global equity Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) to Charles River Investment Management Solution's (Charles River IMS) client base. According to the press release, River's buy-side clients can now lower trading costs by measuring investment strategies and broker performance more effectively in one system.

Charles River and SJ Levinson clients are largely buy-side institutional money managers, including large global hedge funds. In an interview Des Gallacher, VP product management of Charles River, says the aim of the partnership is to embed TCA across the workflow so portfolio managers have access to analytics on a pre- and post-trade basis that help improve portfolio manager decisions throughout the trade life-cycle.

In practice, if a trader decides he/she wants to make a trade, they'll want to know which trader/broker to send the order. "That's historically done with spotted data providers, we bring that all together," says Ethan Levinson, president of SJ Levinson & Sons "If traders want to understand which brokers have particular performance for a name over the past 6 months, we can do that. Previously they may have needed another system to make that decision faster."

The TTCA solution is offered to Charles River clients either in a tab that offers the broadest view of analytics, or as a widget with specific analytics for the trade.

"We integrated with other providers before but we never went to the degree as with the partnership," adds Gallacher. "We're actually providing this service to every client right out of the box." He adds that it's a feature clients have been asking for, and that many have been using multiple providers to reach these goals.

According to Levinson in the press release. “We’re excited to partner with Charles River and believe their clients will benefit immensely from the addition of our TCA solution, TAP (Trade Analysis Program). TAP will arm portfolio managers and traders with the ability to effortlessly implement pre-trade strategies and analyze post-trade results, with extraordinary granularity across a wide range of time increments and perspectives, allowing them to make better and more informed trading decisions to maximize alpha.”

[Check out this case study: Major Online Brokerage Combines People, Process, and Technology to Improve End-User Experience, which will be discussed at the upcoming Interop event in NYC.] Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio