Sell-side experience and time spent at technology firms have led Neil Bond to pursue a liquidity-seeking trading style.
As equity dealer at Ardevora Asset Management, he is a keen proponent for dark pools and stealth strategies.
He has had a long career in trading, starting out in the City of London in 1988 at UBS where he was a research salesman.
He then moved to Boston to establish an international desk for Fidelity Capital Markets.
Bond subsequently joined ITG as a founder member when it launched the first major crossing network in Europe.
While at ITG he built the program trading desk from nothing, turning it into a team that was respected throughout the industry.
After ITG, Bond headed up program trading sales at Bear Stearns and worked at Sanford Bernstein on the program trading and algo team.
The 46 year old from Surrey switched to the buy-side two years ago to become a partner at Ardevora when the company wanted to expand the dealing team to build a more robust trading process.
One of the difficulties that Ardevora was facing when he joined was finding the other side of some of the less liquid names it was holding in portfolios.
Bond decided to expanded the broker network, introduce Trade Cost Analysis (TCA) tools and is currently working on implementing a more sophisticated front-end system.
He opted for ITG’s TCA offering but admits it was a very close field: “Ease of use and large peer database were two of the factors that contributed to our choice,” he explains.
“Integration has been quite smooth, with the main issues being collating the data at our end from our EMS and building filters by our strategies.”
Assets under management at Ardevora when Bond joined were £600m and he expects them to surpass £2 billion by the end of 2015.
To that end, Bond is currently trying to put in place tools that will help the business through this growth period and allow further scalability.
“While I believe that trading will continue to evolve to a more electronic environment, experienced human oversight is crucial,” he says.