Chi-X Europe Moves to BATS Technology
May 1, 2012
All order books for the largest “multilateral facility” for trading in stocks in Europe have been moved over to the BATS Global Markets technology platform, as of Monday.
BATS Chi-X Europe said it completed the migration of the Chi-X Europe order books onto BATS trading systems, at the Equinix LD4 data center in London.on April 30, as planned.
Both BATS Europe and Chi-X Europe now trade using the same technology.
At BATS Europe, the technology carries out orders sent in binary form in an average of 94 millionths of a second, as of March 22. Orders sent using the Financial Information Protocol are executed in an average of 115 microseconds, on a 10 gigabit a second connection.
On a one gigabit connection, those average speeds rise to 116 microseconds and 137 microseconds, respectively.
BATS Global Markets closed the acquisition of Chi-X Europe on November 30, 2011.
Shortly after the merger was completed, BATS Europe experienced a nearly daylong outage. The shutdown was attributed to the failure of a hardware component from an unidentified supplier.
But, the system “has proven its reliability, excelling during heavy load periods on busy days in the European equities market,’’ the firm says.
BATS has, this year, suffered the worst technical glitch in its seven-year life. On March 23, a “software bug” prevented the company from taking its own shares public on its own exchange, on its own technology platform.
The firm said the problem was “wholly of our own making.”
On the second day of trading on the new platform, BATS fell to second place in European equities trading, according to statistics presented on the BATS Europe web site.
Archrival London Stock Exchange Group handled 6,7 billion euros worth of trades or 52.3% of all trading in Europe. BATS Chi-X Europe was second at 27.4%.
Nearly all European markets are closed on May 1, for holiday. London is the only major market open.
Over the last five days, however, BATS Chi-X Europe came in first, at an average of 23.5% of trading. LSE Group came in at 18.9%.
“We are pleased to complete the transition on schedule so that our trading participants can quickly realise the benefits that the BATS Chi-X Europe combination provides, including cost rationalisation, flexibility, choice and continued price leadership,” said Mark Hemsley, chief executive officer of BATS Chi-X Europe.
The BATS Europe and Chi-X Europe order books continue to operate as separate pools of liquidity and will be known respectively as the BXE lit and dark order books and the CXE lit and dark order books.
BATS Chi-X Europe also recently began a program of allowing customers to choose which clearing house they want to use; and completed a secondary data center, to back up its European operations
BATS Europe System Performance Summary
