- Trades Plus is the first product developed in consultation with BMLL’s Client Product Advisory Board and designed to deliver greater market transparency in a single feed
- Provides global market participants with combined trade-by-trade data, normalised trade classifications and market analytics to generate actionable insights into trading and executions
BMLL, the leading, independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3, 2 and 1 data and analytics across global equity, ETFs, futures and options markets, today announced the launch of its Trades Plus dataset, a groundbreaking new product that delivers deep execution insights, designed in collaboration with top global trading firms.
BMLL Trades Plus is an advanced, multi-purpose equities dataset that provides a globally consistent view of every trade by combining granular historical trade data with BMLL's proprietary trade classifications, L1 quotes, custom flags and extensive analytics across global exchanges. Trades Plus allows users to take analysis further, transforming trade records into actionable intelligence to produce detailed transaction cost analysis (TCA), backtest execution algorithms, and identify liquidity provision opportunities - without the need for writing and maintaining the underlying code. This leads to considerable time savings and a significant reduction in the need for coding and compute resources.
In response to demand from - and collaboration with - members of the BMLL Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB), BMLL has launched Trades Plus and added it to its product suite.
Dr Elliot Banks, Chief Product Officer, BMLL, said: “Traders and analysts need to combine trade data with quote data to generate TCA, Best Execution Analysis or compare Market Quality, using a combination of data feeds. To date, this has been a highly repetitive, iterative, and time-consuming process.
But this is about to change. BMLL Trades Plus, our next generation dataset, removes this effort by capturing detailed trade information, BMLL’s proprietary trade classifications and quote-based analytics, into one single multi-purpose dataset. What’s more, research built using 100 lines of code can now be achieved in just three.”
“BMLL Trades Plus is solving a real-world problem. Our CPAB members told us they spend ‘all day long grappling with poor data’ and wanted to be able to get this new dataset off the shelf. BMLL recognises that many other industry participants are facing the same challenge, and we are committed to ensuring they have access to high-quality, usable data that enables better decision-making and supports the wider market.”
Paul Humphrey, Chief Executive Officer, BMLL, added: “When we set up our CPAB forum, we were very clear that this was not going to be a talking shop. Our mission is to elevate the standard of market data for the industry. Our CPAB members include sovereign wealth funds, global asset managers and sophisticated proprietary trading firms, including global banks and liquidity providers. These firms were grappling with the same issue - collating poor quality and disparate data sets into an acceptable, consistent and usable standard - so we knew we had to act. BMLL could perform this task by obsessing over the detail, so that they don’t have to. The CPAB members give us deep insights into their collective requirements and future needs as they navigate highly volatile markets and gain the opportunity to shape BMLL’s product roadmap.
We are delighted to launch BMLL Trades Plus, the first dataset of its kind, and the first developed in consultation with the CPAB and driven by demand for a best-in-class product that facilitates complex execution workflows simply and efficiently. If this is a known issue for our CPAB members, then I am quite sure it is for other firms in our industry”
The BMLL CPAB brings together leading financial institutions to collaborate and determine best-in-class data symbology and normalisation processes, data delivery methods and coverage needs, and make these available to the wider market.
A CPAB member and user of the new Trades Plus dataset said: “The enhanced Trades Plus dataset covers the computationally intensive approach of joining trades to quotes, which in itself is a huge value-add. In addition, the ability to alter the data, which is no longer the “raw feed”, opens doors for future flexibility. And the continued focus on excellent trade classification is very welcome, as this has been a real and significant challenge for us and most of our peers”.
To ensure a consistent view of every historical trade, Trades Plus combines detailed trade-by-trade data with:
- BMLL Trade Classifications: Distinct trade classifications providing a clear and comprehensive view of all on- and off-exchange trading activity across execution mechanisms (e.g. Dark above LIS, Closing Auction, etc.)
- Extensive Trade Flags: Filter to Retail, Odd-lot, Block Trades, reference MMT Flags, etc.
- Order Book Analytics: Leverage single venue or consolidated quote analytics to calculate metrics like Spread Capture, Price Improvement, Time or Volume-based Mark-Outs and more.
The Trades Plus data product is immediately available across Europe via the BMLL Data Lab, a scalable Python research sandbox, and the BMLL Data Feed - via AWS S3, API, SFTP and Snowflake. The US dataset will follow in early Q4 2025.
