Following UBS’s closure of its outsourced trading business, ex-execution hub director Morgan Ralph has been appointed head of Clear Street’s new outsourced trading platform.
The platform has been designed to help fund managers scale their businesses, Clear Street stated, providing a sliding scale of outsourcing from on-demand to a full handover of trading operations.
Speaking to Global Trading earlier this year, Eric Boess, global head of trading at Allianz Global Investors, warned that entirely outsourcing trading operations could hamper a firm’s performance.
“An important part of alpha is market colour. How a market reacts when you trade holds a lot of information about the asset you trade,” he noted. “Our job is to send that information back to the portfolio managers who are interested in it. How can you do this with an outsourced manager, if they don’t understand the portfolio manager’s strategy in depth?”
READ MORE: Outsourced trading: What the buy side really thinks
On the launch, chief commercial officer Andy Volz commented: “Outsourced trading is a direct response to our clients’ needs, allowing the flexibility to scale up, or down, as business ebbs and flows, a common occurrence for small and emerging managers.”
Based in Boston, Ralph has close to 20 years of industry experience and spent almost four years at UBS. Prior to this, he was vice president of investable indices and then outsourced trading solutions at State Street.
READ MORE: Outsourced trading hits speedbump as UBS quits
Earlier in his career, Ralph worked on the institutional equities team at Brown Brothers Harriman and an equity research analyst at FINARC Investment Management.
