prime brokerage...expensive but is it worth it

Guys .....i am setting up prop desk in london...i have been a bank trader for many years .....is it worth having access to ebs and reuters and paying the prime brokerage fees....or would i be better of with a bank platform and having no fees??? just after some advice from guys of similar experience

This years "2 + 2 = 5" thread of the year imo


(sorry, in a funny mood . . . the guy claim's to loads of experience but is asking here whether he needs reuters etc! Furthermore, given the context of his question and the way it is structured, it is far from cleaar if he knows what prime brokerage actually is. Finally, syntactically the question seems to have been written by a school-kid.)

I think it rather depends on how you trade, in addition to what sort of sizes you think you're likely to be executing initially. Reuters matching is still far from cheap.

thanks for your help dashing.......thought the idea of this forum was to help each other out ...guess i was wrong

Richard people would need to know more to help you,your post is unclear about what you know.If you use rueters then we would assume you already know more than most on here.Most posters use chesper data such as Esignal which is on ly £100 a month and slightly slower than rueters.Welcome to the forum ,hopefully you can tell us a few tricks with your experience

Julian , ok fair enough....As you can see I am new on here and I realise my background is different to a lot of guys that have traded from home etc ......When I talk about reuters/ebs i mean having access to the liquidty pools that the top banks use and being able to see the real price action and the regular size of the bids/offers...I am not talkng about reuters data packages, just the actual dealing facility......seeing the lack of liquidty on the weak side is worth its weight in gold to me ......and thats exactly what reuters dealing or ebs dealing will show me....but its bloody expensive

Hmmmm, please accept my apologies Richard.

At the end of the day, data is a commodity, information (ie processed data) is very expensive. If you need it, you're gonna have to pay for it (ie it's ultimately going to come out of your p/l).

Bear in mind however that you're also gonna be dependent on your in-house market data team to maintain a stable environment for you, find out if they have they set something like this up before (this sort of thing is an art not a science!).

May I ask what markets your looking at? (equities at a guess from the prime brokerage reference?)

Setting up a new desk is always going to incur fixed costs, min number of peeps to cover holidays etc, however sharing trade input screens for example shouldn't (on a "this is a greenfields operation so we need to monitor costs" basis) be too onerous.

julian said:

Richard people would need to know more to help you,your post is unclear about what you know.If you use rueters then we would assume you already know more than most on here.Most posters use chesper data such as Esignal which is on ly £100 a month and slightly slower than rueters.Welcome to the forum ,hopefully you can tell us a few tricks with your experience

Click to expand...

He's talking about Reuters MATCHING Julian, not Reuters as a data source per se.