As we mark the end of a remarkable year and begin 2024, we’re reinforcing our commitment to excellence with a phrase that embodies our longstanding dedication: "We care how you fill." These words reflect our enduring promise to provide exceptional service and precision in every transaction and interaction with you, our valued clients and partners.

Completing our sixth year at BestEx Research, we've remained true to our vision of dramatically lowering investors' trading costs across asset classes. Achieving this ambitious goal has required commitment to excellence in client consultation, research, and technology, and I am immensely proud of our advancements in these areas.

Our journey has not been easy. Particularly in the algorithmic trading industry, breaking into a market dominated by established players and convincing institutional investors to trust a startup are immense challenges. We faced skepticism, but our unwavering belief that clients ultimately trust firms who serve them rather than themselves has allowed us to build the right team, develop an exceptional product, partner with clients who believe in our vision, raise funds, and scale our operations. 

Our growth from a team of five in 2017 to a family of 40 in 2023 is a testament to our resilience and dedication. Financially, we’ve seen exceptional growth; while it took us three years to start generating revenues, they have since grown steadily every year–800% over the last two years–and we have reached profitability, a significant milestone considering our humble beginnings with little funding. 

We’ve taken a path less traveled by startups. Rather than quickly raising funds and releasing a half-baked minimum viable product, we have invested in building our best-in-breed algorithmic trading platform. Our Algo Management System, AMS, is purpose-built for automation and measurement, equipped with comprehensive features like a monitoring and service dashboard, backtesting platform, algorithmic trading API, transaction cost analysis, and algo customization tools. AMS’s richness has been integral to our ability to efficiently build and operate robust algorithms across regions and asset classes, while also providing unparalleled customer service. 

Similarly there were no shortcuts in developing our trading engine. We focused on laying a strong foundation instead of merely adding features to a set of basic heuristics. In our first three years, we painstakingly developed our pricing, order routing, and liquidity curation frameworks, and the high-performance algorithms we've built on these foundations have been instrumental to our success and our clients’ satisfaction. Throughout our journey, I believe our success is largely due to the unwavering conviction of our team in our quest to achieve perfection in our technology and user experience.

As 2023 drew to a close, we counted trading volumes of more than $450 billion in equities and futures, nearly doubling our 2022 figures. We're trading more than $3 billion per day, collaborating with 41 clients and partners who manage $10.1 trillion in AUM, and operating from Stamford, London, and Bangalore. Our dual business models–a SaaS platform and an agency broker-dealer–have been highly effective in leveraging our technology to meet our clients’ differing needs. Our algorithms have received high rankings in both quantitative and qualitative assessments of performance on our clients' “algo wheels'' among both VWAP and liquidity-seeking algorithms.

In 2023, we focused on further enhancing our futures and equity products’ performance and resilience. We improved our pricing model, introduced the next generation of our customization tool Strategy Studio, and launched Adaptive Optimal, a framework for building liquidity-seeking and implementation shortfall algorithms that won Waters Technology’s 2023 award for Best Buy-Side Trading Tool. We also built tools that allow quick detection of outages at venues, which has become commonplace in our fragmented markets, and we are often first to detect and inform venues of the issues we see. 

As we step into 2024, we remain devoted to our clients. Expect unique product developments, new tools for both algorithmic execution and pre- and post-trade analysis, new markets, insightful analysis, and unwavering service as you use our platform. Meeting your expanding needs continues to be our priority; you can rely on us to listen, adapt, expand our platform, and engage in research that lowers your trading costs. 

We have three remarkable performance improvements positioned for unveiling this year, and we believe they’ll be game-changers for our clients after meeting our rigorous beta testing and A/B testing requirements. 

As we enter the new year, we do so with gratitude for your continued partnership and shared investment in our vision. Together, we will continue to make each fill count. At BestEx Research we genuinely care how you fill, in every sense of the word.

In partnership,

Hitesh Mittal