Despite being around for about two decades, outsourced trading desks have become popular over the past few years as asset managers—who are struggling to find alpha as investors switch from active to passive strategies—find themselves needing to cut costs. And as larger funds seek to outsource, the trend might be here to stay.

Sources say broker-dealers have not yet signed an agreement allowing them access to the test environment.

Development of machine learning and natural-language processing is now turning to languages other than English to keep a better eye on traders and the market. But how easy is it to teach a machine a new tongue?