It was a lot easier on the buy-side back when you traded with human beings. These days, the main liquidity providers tend to be super automated, faceless algorithm driven entities. You can either pine for the old days or accept reality. At Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB), the new head of equity electronic trading, Jose Marques, is opting for the latter, transforming the set of buy-side tools available to his firm to work better in a high-frequency environment (high-frequency trading news).

For many, "liquidity providers are a totally foreign thing, and there's a real mismatch between the two," he tells Traders. What the buy-side needs are tools that can think like the sell-side's tools. In his short sting at the bank, he has been "transforming the firm's algos into trading tools that more resemble the ones high-frequency traders use."

Last spring, Deutsche Bank launched a dark pool-aggregator called SuperX that made quite a splash when it was released in March. The firm pitched it as major step up in dark pool innovation for users bent on better management of this liquidity. SuperX determines the best place to trade, given the trader's constraints and where it has found the least leakage. If the order is creating too many market ripples, the algo backs off of the trade. Marques plans on re-doing the entire set of buy-side algos at the firm. 

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