Ten Trading Technology Trends and Tools for 2010

December 17, 2009
Alexa Jaworski

Despite the continued economic downturn, many buy- and sell-side firms still opened their wallets in the search for best-of-breed technology solutions. In order to decrease latency and increase speed, countless firms both big and small, bulge-bracket and boutique, have upgraded trading platforms, invested in latency management solutions, or set themselves up at co-location facilities.

But the race to have the best technology that will slice latency down to microseconds—and eventually, nanoseconds— is far from over. In interviews with Securities Industry News, industry experts pointed at technology solutions the buy and sells sides are expected to spend their dollars in the New Year.

Networking (both intra- and inter- data center). Growing market data message rates and shrinking latency have made networks a key focus of the sell side, said Kevin McPartland, senior analyst with the Tabb Group. “Upgrades of data center network equipment and purchases of long distance bandwidth will accelerate driven by current bandwidth requirements and future capacity planning,” explained McPartland. “And looking beyond bandwidth and transmission speed, reliability is tremendously important as downtime in today's market is unacceptable.” The core goal: Reduce the number of hops or other factors that introduce network inefficiencies.