LSE: Turquoise Now World's Fastest Platform
October 20, 2010
LSE: Turquoise World’s Fastest Platform
By Chris Kentouris
The London Stock Exchange on Wednesday claimed that Turquoise is the world’s fastest trading platform with an average order latency of 126 microseconds following its migration to the Millennium IT technology system.
The speed has come after an early technical glitch was fixed. On October 4 ,Turquoise moved over in a “ big bang approach” from a previous trading platform supplied by Swedish technology firm Cinnober to a new platform supplied by MillenniumIT. The Sri Lankan vendor was acquired by the LSE for $30 million last September.
An "internal network error" knocked Turuoise out for an hour. But, since then, the exchange says average order entry latency is now twice as fast as Turquoise's main international competitors on a like-for-like basis. Those competitors are BATS Europe and Nasdaq OMX.
The 126 microsecond figure refers to the average order latency for firms using a native application programming interface. The latency rises to 196 microseconds when the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) 5.0 protocol is used. About 99.9 percent of all customer orders on the new system are accepted, processed and acknowledged within 400 microseconds.
Recent competition between trading venues has helped move the market forward,” says David Lester, CEO of Turquoise. “With Turquoise now offering average end-to-end trading of just 126 microseconds, twice as fast our competitors, we've made it clear we intend to compete, and compete strongly. "
Turquoise’s new technology platform ran into some major glitches since it was installed, including internal network problems on October 5, which caused Turquoise to start trading at 9:15AM local time; that’s an hour and fifteen minutes after the standard market opening. As a result, the LSE has set back the timetable for migration of its main market to MillenniumIT to allow for further testing. The exchange had initially planned the switch for 1 November.
