Is ClOrdID for originator or originator's broker?

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Imported from previous forum

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Apologies for the length of this message.

I’m having a debate with someone on who owns the use of tag 11 ClOrdID. We looked to past discussion board posts, 4.4 Spec, and FIXimate for a concrete answer, but we agreed there wasn’t one. I’ll explain why, but first here’s the scenario in regard to Parties involved with the order:

  1. Order Originator (Individual investor/trader, or professional trader at a private trading operation like hedge fund or money management firm).
    2a) Third-Party Order Management System that the Order Originator uses to originate the order.
    2b) Order Originator’s proprietary Order Management System, which can also be used to originate the order.
  2. Order Originator’s broker, which has a proprietary Order Routing System/Transaction Gateway and all orders are handled electronically.
  3. Sell-side via a Liquidity Venue (Exchange, ECN, etc.)

I say the order originator owns the ClOrdID and my counterpart thinks it’s the originator’s broker who owns it. Keep in mind that the order originator is using order management software that assigns Order ID’s when it creates orders (regardless of the type of user), so the software also expects to use the ClOrdID to place its Order ID into. This has actually branched into a broader debate about who should really get what in terms of use of IDs, OnBehalfOf’s, use of Party roles and things like that.

Now we didn’t think the documentation clearly addresses the debate because there is so much ambiguity in the documentaion in general, most resulting from use of ambigous terms. For example, the FIXimate Comment for ClOrdID says the following: “with closest association with the investor.” We think that’s ambigous and should be supported with a better explanation.

Here’s all what the documentaion has to say:

Tag 11 ClOrdID…

4.4 Spec Field Description:
Unique identifier for Order as assigned by the buy-side (institution, broker, intermediary etc.) (identified by SenderCompID (49) or OnBehalfOfCompID (115) as appropriate). Uniqueness must be guaranteed within a single trading day. Firms, particularly those which electronically submit multi-day orders, trade globally or throughout market close periods, should ensure uniqueness across days, for example by embedding a date within the ClOrdID field.

FIXimate Comment for use in New Order Single Message:
"Unique identifier of the order as assigned by institution or by the intermediary (CIV term, not a hub/service bureau) with closest association with the investor."

Now contrast that with the 4.4 Spec Field Description for Tag 526 SecondaryClOrdID…
"Assigned by the party which originates the order. Can be used to provide the ClOrdID (11) used by an exchange or executing system."

Note that for SecondaryClOrdID it says “Assigned by the party which originates the order” versus ClOrdID where it says “assigned by the buy-side (institution, broker, intermediary etc.) (identified by SenderCompID (49) or OnBehalfOfCompID (115)”…
So why does one refer to the party that originates the order and the other refer to the buy-side? Isn’t buy-side ambigous here, in that both the order originator and their Broker represent the buy-side?

What might be needed needed:
Use more concrete terms in the documentaion, and/or provide contexual examples of each fields use and the parties who typically uses them. Also, a more clear description of what a field is intended to convey, particularly in contetxt to that parties role in the message. As it stands, even though the documentaion provides a matter-of-fact like description of the fields, so many of them are not at all explained in any detail.

In the same spirit that the spec provides a detailed order state change matrice, it would be useful to have a field use matrice that would include a ‘best practices’ and ‘most common use’ scenarios. I think one of the most common problems facing new FIX implementors is in determining… “do we need to use that field for our role?” and in understanding what the value is suppose to convey contextually for different party roles. This is especially true for those coming at it from a non-transactional industry focus.

Thanks, John