BofA/Merrill Rolls Out New Options Algorithms

Offering new sweeps and iceberging to institutional equity and options traders and broker dealers.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced today the addition of four new electronic options algorithms to the company's algorithmic trading platform.

The four new options algorithms include:

Clean Sweep - Exhausts hidden and displayed liquidity and then posts residual;

Hidden Sweep - Unique logic that sweeps the market when the order is marketable. The residual will not post;

Iceberg - A synthetic reserve order allowing traders to designate how much of the order should be displayed when posting to the market;

NBBO Sweep - An order type that selects exchange based on NBBO. Order will shift to a 'sweep' strategy based on displayed liquidity.

These algorithms join the company's existing options and stock-specific algorithmic strategies designed for institutional equity and options traders, as well as broker dealers.

"We developed these options algorithms in response to client requests for additional flexibility to dynamically interact with available liquidity, as well as to navigate sophisticated exchange market structure," said Jon Werts, head of Broker Dealer Execution Services.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch's options algorithms are available directly from its proprietary platforms InstaQuote and ML X-Trade, its proprietary FIX API, as well as third-parties including Bloomberg, ConvergEx's Eze OMS, Derivix, and RealTick.