Quote from MVP:
I wonder how many Bright offices are profitable?
Here's one company that has taken a back seat...
I wish I could print a list of the traders who blew up at Bright because of slow-bleed from desk fees and REDI problems.
Blew up from desk fee's. LOL Your kidding right. The desk fees are a couple hundred bucks a month and you get them back at the end of the year if you are doing just a tiny bit of volume.
Redi+ when measured against realtick, gr8trade, hammer, sterling, cybertrader, etc is inferior in several regards (needing a seperate program to get bullets being the most obvous area where they have fallen behind) however what they are lacking in an execution platform they have made up for traditionally in leverage and execution costs.
Will Bright prosper going forward with the stale redi+ technology? Not if everyone else's technology keeps moving forward at a faster pace that redi+'s does and look around because that is surely the case currently.
But Bright likely still will Prosper because eventually they will exert enough pressure for redi+ to get their act together or they will adapt and offer other options to their traders. The Trader Technology thing they sponsored here in Atlanta had a Penson clearing there as well as Realtick so prehaps Bright is figuring it out already and maybe they will give traders a choice going foward like some other firms like Echo already do. It would be suprising if they don't as Don goes to all these trading expo things and gets exposed to the new stuff atleast as much as any one else.
Eitherway, IMO all firms on both the retail and prop side have to be looking over their shoulder at Andover right now because not only do they seem to have a cost advantage over other firms that don't self-clear but with SDS buying them you can expect their already robust trading platform to only get better.
(with some firms there is the the firm, the software, and the clearing company, as thing move toward consolidation as they have been we have seen the merger of all three...an example being protrader being bought by instinet and thus having the firm basically do it all clear through instinet, and trade through gr8trade, only its still a retail op and they don't have an exchange seat or the volume numbers so they don't have the pure cost advantage that the more pure prop firms have, i.e. they have lost or will lose their highest volume traders because as everyone knows when you start to do big volume the smallest increase or decrease in rates has a huge effect on your longer-term bottom line....way more than most 20-40K share a day traders grasp).
With andover they have found away to tie it all together lately as well as anyone has to this point: Low execution costs, Leverage, AND exceptional platform.
Why it has taken this long for one firm to do it....I have no freakin idea.
