Who are the leaders in trading & execution?

AsianInvestor has polled 50 buy-sides either located in, or trading, Asia-Pacific equities to ask them who are the best service providers in trading and execution.

This is the first time we've done this, so 50 houses ain't bad, although next year we'd prefer to get 100. Fifty buy-sides are enough to give us an idea of the best providers, but not enough to say unequivocally what providers are best. (It also may be biased towards houses that pushed for clients to vote.)

Therefore we will present here the top three or four vote-getters in each of our 14 categories. These are the firms we are now asking for pitches for the award. A few firms such as Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse enjoyed broad support across categories.

For purposes of coming up with shortlists, we also double-weighted votes from the bigger buy-sides (14 out of our 50). Some very large fund management companies participated and we felt their opinions should have extra resonance.

There were also plenty of votes from the sell-side. We appreciate the enthusiasm but those votes were deleted. Nice try, guys!

So, just to repeat: The survey is an eligibility step for an award, but not the award itself. The awards will be announced online during the week of September 21. We will publish the survey's complete results in the magazine later this year. For now, here's a taste of how the votes went down -- and who is being asked to pitch for the award -- ranking the top-three vote getters in order.

Best full-service broker
Morgan Stanley
Credit Suisse
Deutsche Bank

Best execution-only broker
ITG
Morgan Stanley
Instinet

Best exchange for algorithmic/electronic trading (stock exchange or dark pool)
Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing
Morgan Stanley MS-BXS
Tokyo Stock Exchange

Best exchange for block trading (stock exchange or dark pool)
Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing
Morgan Stanley
Credit Suisse
Liquidnet

Best algorithms
Credit Suisse AES
ITG
UBS
Macquarie

Best FX service
Morgan Stanley
JP Morgan
UBS
Citi

Best program trading
Morgan Stanley
Credit Suisse
Citi

Best block trading
Morgan Stanley
CLSA
JP Morgan

Best futures trading
Morgan Stanley
Goldman Sachs
JP Morgan

Best transition management
(This award is special as we are also conducting a more traditional pitch process amongst custodian banks and other TM providers, so the following firms will compete in that mix, if they have not already been asked to participate.)
Morgan Stanley
Deutsche Bank
Citi

Best high touch/sales trading
Morgan Stanley
Deutsche Bank
Nomura
UBS

Best smart-order routing
Credit Suisse
UBS

Best trading system
Credit Suisse
ITG
Charles River
Bloomberg

Best risk-management system
Morgan Stanley
Charles River
Fidessa