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Nicholas Pratt

In equities DMA emerged over the last decade as a way of providing buy-side firms with an undiluted means of access to the exchanges and other execution venues

Up till this point the only way that an asset manager, hedge fund or corporate could access the market was via a broker
However as electronic trading began to thrive, leading to more advanced strategies such as algorithmic trading and facilitating the growth of high frequency trading hedge funds, the conventional broker-based means of execution began to feel insufficient to these new breed of buy-side traders