So, who gets the crown for getting the best stock prices for institutional clients globally? Bloomberg has awarded the title to Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB) in something of surprise. The broker displaced Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), the winner the previous year (for the 12 months ending at the end of September). Goldman in fact fell all the way to ninth place.

"This year's best performers found ways to piece together the liquidity investors needed even with trading splintered across public exchanges, dark pools and private platforms," notes Bloomberg.

What's behind Deutsche Bank's success? It apparently overhauled its electronic stock trading and analytics platform and staffed up with industry veterans. Its algorithms are flexible and have drawn lots of industry praise. "One program, called SuperX, responds to instructions about how aggressive to be in filling an order while tapping up to 20 dark pools--private trading venues that don't display bids and offers in advance. The bank also boosted the historical and real-time data analytics that feed its algorithms and expanded trading in its own dark pool, called DBA."

An internalized dark pool would seem to be critical to this, making Goldman's fall all the more surprising. But Goldman was not the only bulge bracket U.S. firm to fare poorly. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase all dropped off the top 10 global list. Perhaps the financial crisis took a toll.

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