In 2010, financial markets participants will continue to expand their trading activities as liquidity increasingly becomes fragmented, seeking alpha in new markets, best execution in dark pools, arbitrage opportunities across the order book and by implementing high frequency and complex, multi-leg, cross asset class strategies.
The successful operations – whether they be the proprietary desks of traditional broker/dealers, specialist high frequency and algorithmic traders, or quantitative hedge funds – will leverage a trading infrastructure that combines high performance analytical, algorithmic and order routing platforms with the lowest latency access to multiple, geographically dispersed execution venues.
This briefing paper - see end of post for download link - reports on the activity of a consortium of leading IT vendors that have joined forces to create demonstrable high performance solution stacks to address common business requirements in financial trading. The initial focus of the consortium is on a reference-able technology stack of products and services to support FIX protocol communication functions.
Automated trading in the financial markets continues to grow, as it is adopted beyond equities into other asset classes, and as its use expands globally.
In recent years, a combination of regulatory reforms, market structure evolution and technology innovation have combined to create a new paradigm for the global financial trading markets; one in which the speed at which transactions can be executed is fundamental to the success of market participants.
Colocation has established itself as the access mechanism for trading firms requiring the fastest possible execution. It’s widely accepted that for firms wanting the lowest latency access to a specific market there is no substitute for placing their trading applications as close as possible to the matching engines themselves, making it the solution of choice for all but those focusing on multi-venue multi-location arbitrage.
High frequency trading (HFT) is now a term recognised by the mainstream. This wide familiarity has coincided with maturity of HFT practices, the explosion in their use, and a flattening out of the potential returns as competition increases.
This white paper is sponsored and written by Informatica, HP, and Mellanox Technologies.
Today speed is crucial to any trading venue that wants to stay competitive. At the same time, with high-frequency trading gaining an increasing share of overall volumes, the ability to manage rising transaction volumes is also a necessity.
This Sun Microsystems white paper – written in conjunction with A-Team Group – examines the hotspots within an electronic trading environment and considers routes and technologies that might contribute to reducing or even eliminating latency.