March and April 2008 saw a packed schedule in London with 2 fasterCITY events in quick succession – fasterTRADING on March 4 and fasteraMARKET DATA on 28 April.

Both events attracted packed audiences to this now established regular forum in The City’s calendar which puts technology developments in the context of the markets; key issues.

Nigel Woodward Global Director, Financial Services Intel

At fasterTRADING George Andreadis of Credit Suisse discussed the European challenges of multiple emerging MTF execution venues, the quest for speed and smart sourcing of liquidity, the service levels of smart order routing and placement strategies – these are all in the mix for a viable sell side business increasingly under pressure to innovate to stay ahead. Peter Randall, characteristically laid down the gauntlet from a venue point of view by reporting record volumes – finer spreads and market share and a new technology optimised infrastructure to keep Chi-X at the forefront of the exchange business. This was matched by the usual innovation of Kevin Houstoun discussing the new BidROUTE venture, representative of the new trade value chain innovation that is now possible with low barriers to entry from high performance industry standard technologies (encouraged by Intel!) – and the potential this offers for better liquidity and price discovery across the markets diversity of stocks, buyers and sellers.

Tony Bishop, ex Wachovia CTO and now representing Verari with Dimi Ziakis Principle Engineer at Intel for Financial Services provided the technology context to the subject.

Tony commented on the complexities and sensitivities in engineering today’s trading infrastructures. This included the extreme project management disciplines needed to manage all the moving parts and their contributions to optimised performance. Dimi discussed Intel’s investments in technologies which directly impact the low latency arms race and increasingly underpin many of the market’s new trading infrastructures as they gear up for greater trade volumes and speed. Looking at how solutions are built, Dimi described the work conducted in the Intel fasterLAB to simulate and test the effect of advanced technologies on latency reduction.

The usual panel, this time with representatives from Reuters, Verari, BEA, Fujitsu Siemens, and NYSE-Euronext engaged in discussion around new business drivers affecting service providers to the market and the technology industry’s ability to provide cost and environmentally effective technologies to support the change underway.

FasterMARKET DATA on 28 April completed the loop on the trading front office by focussing on this (exploding) life blood of the markets. Mark Reece of The London Stock Exchange discussed how the exchange has been chasing the ever increasing trade volumes and has seen how volume directly correlate to the level at which they publish prices to the market. In their quest for speed of both execution and data dissemination Mark discussed the tuning activities they are conducting for InfoLECT and TradELECT, which include close collaboration with Intel and partners around fasterLAB. Peter Lankford of STAC brought the audience up to speed with developments to establish an industry standard for latency measurement – facilitating both comparism of sell side service and technology investment selection. Rolf Andersson of Pantor Engineering elaborated on the need to for detailed and advanced architectural design to get the very best out of technology at the leading edge of the front office and the advances in take up and performance of FIX’s F.A.S.T market data compression standard.

A fascinating panel of Reuters, FixNetix, CJC-IT, Celoxica and Endace drew the session to a conclusion by discussing the range of market data related topics from legacy replacement of old distribution platforms, proximity to venues and how to harness geography, to the use of emerging new technologies in the acceleration space.

Both sessions – in usual format then advanced swapping notes, making new friends and agreeing actions to the backdrop of tasting of fine wines – compered by Chief Wine Office.

The next fasterCITY event fasterMESSAGING AUTOMATION and STP will be on Monday 23 June – information and registration.

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Filed under: Issue 5 - Summer 08, Trading