WATS® Equities

The WATS® Equity Electronic Trading business offers a unique approach to helping you meet your best execution goals. Backed by Wells Fargo Securities' proprietary smart order router, the WATS suite of algorithms is designed to optimize price and liquidity discovery, and incorporates quantitative logic configured to your needs.

Dedicated service teams

  • Market expertise – Our skilled electronic coverage team is fully staffed to add scale and provide differentiated customer service.
  • Single point of contact – Our team approach will extend your reach across the entire platform.

Quantitative process

  • Performance – Dedicated quantitative  team focused on data driven algorithmic and smart order router client optimizations.
  • Thought and innovation – Our team combines breadth of experience and deep understanding of market structure to create custom solutions thru cutting edge product development.
  • Analytics – Advanced quantitative foundation in machine learning provides robust multi-factor analytics to combine macro, micro, and order level profiling for a comprehensive top down, and bottom up approach.

Smart order router (SOR)

  • Rebate agnostic – Our SOR technology emphasizes synchronized order routing to deliver fast market access, while also minimizing quote leakage and signaling.
  • Low latency market access – Dedicated Wells Fargo collocated servers use state of the art gateway technology.
  • Market data – Direct subscription to primary market data with SIP data feeds maintained for redundancy.

Liquidity capture: dark and lit

  • Unique liquidity – Access to Wells Fargo institutional and retail flow through WATS algo suite.
  • Dark aggregator – Access to all relevant dark pools with several levels of aggression. Incorporates proprietary logic that maximizes hidden liquidity while balancing opportunistic price improvement.
  • Komodo – Liquidity seeking strategy scales aggression based on historical and real-time factors. Incorporates dark aggregation logic with lit and market-making venues to diversify liquidity capture.
  • Protection – Anti-gaming tactics constructed to mitigate adverse selection, including child order size, price, venue, time, and duration diversification.

Close access

  • DMA – Access to closing auctions at all primary listing venues.
  • d-Order – Electronic access to NYSE's d-Order offers enhanced time, limit price and cancellation flexibility.
  • Smart close algo – Strategy manages market impact and benchmark slippage.
  • Smart LOC strategy – Reduce operational risk while improving timing and precision of limits used for the closing auction.

Commission management

  • Wells Fargo commission management service manages soft-dollar commissions and payments to aggregators, brokerages, and independent research firms permissible under Section 28(e).
  • Dedicated team and website to track accrued commission and manage vendor payments.

Learn about WATS Equities algorithms

Learn about WATS algorithms

Strategy
Description
Open / Close
Extended hours
I would
Conditional options
Force complete
Komodo

Opportunistic strategy that scales based on price, liquidity, and volatility

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Dark only Sources liquidity in dark pools only
Yes

Yes
Yes
Yes
IS

Utilizes WATS forecasting model to minimize slippage between arrival price and execution price

Yes

Yes
Yes
Yes
Close
Intelligently adjusts to predicted market volume to minimize impact on the closing auction
Yes
DMA
Accesses all NMS market centers, including select dark venues, through proprietary smart router

Yes
Yes
VWAP
Aims to minimize slippage to Volume Weighted Average Price

Yes
Yes
Yes
TWAP
Aims to minimize slippage to the Time Weighted Average Price

Yes
Yes
Yes
POV
Intelligently trades as a target percentage of market volume, reacting to real time market activity

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Peg
Floats orders at a level pegged at or within the NBBO based on the trader’s reference price

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

Where to find us

Find WATS Equities on all OMS/EMS providers including:

  • Bloomberg
  • Charles River
  • Eze Castle
  • Fidessa
  • FlexTrade
  • Instinet Newport3
  • ITG Triton
  • ITG Radical
  • LatentZero
  • LineData/LongView
  • Macgregor
  • Moxy
  • Neovest
  • PortWare
  • RealTick
  • Redi
  • Reuters
  • Tethys
  • TradingScreen

For information on all WATS Bloomberg offerings visit our execution page WATS< GO >