Market events are a reality. With the right timing, they can mean unique, profitable trading positions. With the wrong timing, they can mean missed opportunities.

However, it’s more than just timing and accurate data that give traders the ability to harvest those events. Often, these opportunities come down to strategic decisions, smart teamwork, and flexible collaboration.

Iron Man—aside from being a box-office hit—took advantage of those same collaborative efforts to ultimately save the planet. Iron Man’s fictional success was actually predicated on his ad-hoc-ness – and the ability to bring different skill-sets, and team members, to the table to mitigate an event.

Now, you may or may not have the fate of the world on your shoulders each day, but you still need better tools to bring together the right people at the right time, so that your firm works efficiently and stays competitive.

Here are three things Iron Man did that you can apply to optimize trading workflow:

• Stay human: People are still every trading firm’s best resource. With increased regulation, it’s more important than ever to integrate compliance, research, risk and other departments at the right time.
• Be pro-active: Part of trading does rely on a certain “reactivity”, but by setting in place unique applications to alert you and your counterparties you can pro-actively streamline your reactivity.
• Use customizable tools: Embed communications directly into the applications you use through the trade workflow to simplify how and when you interact, tie events back to trades, and improve accuracy.

One of the best ways to implement these three strategies is to use a customizable application platform that creates tailored solutions for specific market events. For some, this could mean creating an environment that seamlessly reacts to market events, integrating global directories and presence, creating trade execution triggers based on market event analytics, or even optimizing trade reporting workflow to ensure compliance. Regardless of how you refine your current trading techniques and tools you use, collaboration is still key.

Whether you’re saving the world or saving a position, it’s critical to employ the right team at the right time.