Sterling Trader's Global Expansion Gives Traders More Options

Sterling Trader recently announced that it is expanding to new markets. Sterling Trader Pro customers are now able to trade equities across numerous equity exchanges throughout Europe, including the London Stock Exchange. "Sterling Trader is one of the largest DMA platforms in the world," Jim Nevotti, president of Sterling Trader, told Benzinga. "Our clients are primarily professional traders. We have roughly 5,000 traders worldwide." Nevotti said the global expansion is exciting because "we're offering trading in most of continental Europe." Remaining countries will be added at a later date. "We're going to launch in Japan and Australia in the coming months and we're rolling out a mobile Web version of the platform as well," he added.

'Large International Client Base'

Sterling Trader's expansion is part of the company's desire to serve traders outside of the United States. "We have a large international client base," said Nevotti. "Roughly half of our users are outside of North America. Right now most of them are trading the US markets." Nevotti said that Sterling Trader recognized that its "heavy international client base" needs more opportunities. "The push for Europe is that we have a number of trading groups in Europe that use us to trade US and they wanted to be able to use the same software to trade both US and European [stocks]," Nevotti explained, adding that the Europe demand was driven by clients. "There's not many platforms that can do that. Most platforms are tied to regions."

Big Obstacles

There aren't many platforms that offer trading in multiple international markets. Nevotti explained why. "There are significant technical challenges, as well as cost challenges, where it's very difficult to offer international trading on a cost-effective basis," said Nevotti. "We formed a series of strategic relationships with both market data providers and execution partners so we could really utilize an economy of scale and let Sterling Trader, which is a relatively small organization, really become a worldwide company." Nevotti said that the biggest hurdles to trading internationally (from a platform standpoint) is the "expense and the technology knowhow." "We did a series of strategic partnerships so that we can offer data from virtually any major worldwide exchange," he said. "Because of [those] partnerships, that really let us be customer-driven. Otherwise it would have been too expensive to go into each individual market directly with the exchanges." Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.