To me, the most exciting evolution at GlobeFlex is our seamless electronic integration of alpha, risk, and transaction costs into our newly reengineered research platform. Then customizing it to the way we want to build portfolios and being able to execute it quickly over to our trade- order management system. The whole process is unbelievably adaptive.

Our flexibility is enormous. Rather than portfolio-by-portfolio analytics, we can now "plug and play" as many variables as necessary both at the individual stock and portfolio level.

We've built a customized optimizer, which includes all our return, risk and transaction cost information. We continue to weigh the important questions: How much time do we have to implement/trade? How good is our information? What is our sustainable edge? How much and what kind of risk are we taking? We determine how quickly to trade a stock and how best to trade it via traditional channels or on crossing networks.

Having all things integrated means we can truly focus on maximizing our information ratio, and with a strong dose of repeatability. We have never before been able to reach this level of knowledge and confidence -- knowing that we now have the tools to cover all the bases.