From Paul Scott, Global Head of Liquidity Discovery, NYSE Technologies:

At NYSE Technologies, we recently announced our partnership with SmartPool — the Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) jointly owned by NYSE Euronext and HSBC, J.P. Morgan, and BNP Paribas — to provide MatchView, a new service designed to help traders and other market participants to access, interpret, and navigate post-trade data published by European dark trading venues.

MatchView will be a module within ioinet, the NYSE Technologies’ liquidity discovery platform (acquired via NYFIX), and it will be populated with information from the SmartPool post-trade data feed, which is carried by our market data product, SuperFeed.

Leveraging the analytic capabilities of ioinet, we created custom screens based on SmartPool trading data to give real-time insight into and unique graphical ways to look at the trading activity of the dark pool. Further, SmartPool plans to grow the content of MatchView to include the other European dark trading pools, and potentially, broker dark pools as well. There will be a new level of transparency to the European markets that is keenly anticipated by SmartPool clients and the marketplace at large.

I am excited about this initiative as it demonstrates ioinet’s ability to serve as a desktop toolkit for our clients to source liquidity. They can now see not only off-market, broker-provided liquidity, but also dark trading activity. The ability to leverage the vast amount of market data that we have internally to create new products for the market, in a very short timeframe, demonstrates how NYSE Euronext continues to leverage the NYFIX acquisition for our clients’ benefit and the rapid growth in our relationship with SmartPool.

The ability to create custom ways to look at data sets the ioinet platform apart in the market. For a deeper view into our liquidity discovery tool, go to www.alter-your-perspective.com.

From Bob Moitoso, Senior Vice President, NYSE Technologies:

Good afternoon,everyone:

This week, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel entitled “Finding a Single Solution for Global Connectivity” at the TradeTech USA event in New York. Steven Pae from Morgan Stanley moderated the panel while my fellow panelists included Mohammad Ayach of OrbiMed Advisors from the buy-side and several other connectivity service providers.

We discussed the latest trends in the Connectivity space. A few to highlight:
• The buy-side continues to gravitate toward more managed connectivity solutions rather than managing it themselves.
• Sell-side firms are focusing much more on costs, actively managing client connectivity, and consolidating infrastructure. As a result of consolidating infrastructure, many firms are looking to outsource their connectivity management.
• There continues to be a high expectation on service quality and aspects like provisioning and reliability help tremendously when things go wrong.

Another important discussion at TradeTech was how you should evaluate your connectivity provider. I found there were six major areas of evaluation:

• Service
• Reliability – it just has to work!
• Strength of the global community
• Expertise - you want a provider that has the expertise to help you navigate FIX
• Provisioning – start trading faster
• Flexibility - not all FIX is equal, you need to be able to optimize!

The bottom line is that your vendor should allow you to focus on your core competency, which is the investment process. At NYSE Technologies, our Marketplace connectivity service helps you do this by providing the white glove client service you expect (fast on-boarding, 24×6 global support), the strength of the large global Marketplace community, plus the reliability, flexible interpretation of FIX, and 15+ years of expertise in the business.

We’ll be talking about how our connectivity solution and global client community plays an important role in the NYSE Technologies story at the NYSE Euronext Investor Day next Wednesday.

Please feel free to comment on this thought-provoking discussion.

From Bob Moitoso, Senior Vice President, NYSE Technologies:

At NYSE Technologies, we recently announced the availability of ioinet™ v2. This new class of liquidity discovery tool provides innovative ways for traders to find liquidity and make more informed trading decisions.

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of an IOI, also known as an Indication of Interest, it refers to a way in which a broker can advertise their off-market (or agency) order flow to their buy-side institutions. It is in itself not a firm agreement to trade, but a key component in finding the other side of a transaction.

Our ioinet application is a liquidity discovery solution that addresses the challenge of finding liquidity in a fragmented marketplace by combining our global community of over 500 counterparties with sophisticated pre- and post-trade analysis, filtering, alerting capabilities and seamless integration into your trading workflow via your order/execution management system (OMS/EMS) and other desktop trading tools such as your market data applications.

I am excited about this latest version of ioinet because traders are no longer bound by traditional IOI services that limit the way in which traders can view liquidity. ioinet v2 gives traders the flexibility to create personalized perspectives, which update in real time, to display liquidity information in multiple dimensions, enabling them to better identify trends and find trading hot spots.

With the ability to sort and filter IOI and advertised trade data using a wide range of custom charting techniques, traders can build, save, and share among their desks an unlimited number of personalized liquidity perspectives.

We invite you to take a look at our ioinet v2 webpage, http://www.alter-your-perspective.com, to discover what type of perspectives you can create or even sign up for one of our webinars to get a more in-depth glimpse into our world of liquidity discovery.

From Daniel Romanelli, Managing Director, Business Development at NYSE Technologies:

Yesterday, the SEC held a meeting on sponsored access (SA) and other market-structure topics. The SEC press release is available here. In summary regarding SA, the commission unanimously voted in favor of proposing a new unified rule regarding risk management controls and supervisory procedures to manage financial, regulatory, and other risks for brokers or dealers that provide market access. Please note that this rule is not yet final and is now open for public comment.

The commissioners honed in on the need for both pre- and post-trade risk controls and the elimination of “naked access.” What this means is that the member broker/dealer (B/D) may be required to apply credit and fat-finger checks pre-trade as well as devise a post-trade regulatory supervision system. An additional effect of this codification of sponsored access rules provides B/D’s with clarity into their responsibilities and eliminates certain gray areas.

NYSE Technologies’ Risk Management Gateway (RMG) offers brokers these risk controls in a hosted, managed solution to multiple execution venues. I will be describing the features of the RMG in future blog entries.

Back in November we built a great demo comparing RDMA to TCP over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and we showed it on the Intel stand at Super Computing 2009 in Portland, Oregon. During the same show I got the chance to present to conference attendees on the reason why NYSE Euronext strongly supports Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) as a way to increase data throughput while reducing transport latency. In these days of high-frequency trading, low latency and high-throughput are the two most critical technology challenges facing all financial services firms — large and small. You can watch a video recording of that presentation below:

From Bob Moitoso:

Good afternoon, I am Bob Moitoso, Senior Vice President at NYSE Technologies. Earlier today, you may have seen me, along with my colleagues, ringing the Opening Bell(SM) to commemorate the Nov. 30 close of NYSE Euronext’s acquisition of NYFIX, Inc. (View the Opening Bell here.)

As part of the acquisition, I am thrilled to bring NYFIX’s line of connectivity, liquidity discovery, agency order management, and FIX software tools to NYSE Technologies’ mix of end-to-end trading solutions. This deal expands NYSE Technologies’ global offering and diversifies its client base by adding over 450 buy-side and 600 sell-side firms to further increase access to global liquidity.

A major benefit NYFIX clients will receive is that they can now leverage the stability, global resources, and technology assets of NYSE Euronext. Customers can be more confident that resources will be applied to the stability and growth of all the products in the NYFIX suite. NYFIX has had a rich history of innovation, but we now have the NYSE Euronext firepower to take it to the next level.

Further, I believe we’ll be able to address the industry’s “need for speed” by moving our clients closer to the point of execution. With plans to move NYFIX infrastructure to NYSE Euronext data centers, our community will be able to take advantage of lower latency electronic trading connectivity.

In the coming months, I look forward to discussing new opportunities that lie ahead with our combined client bases. Stay tuned – the best is yet to come!

From Feargal O’Sullivan, High Performance Messaging at NYSE Technologies:

I’m here in Portland, Oregon, the city with the best micro-breweries, I’m told (a claim I’ll be sure to validate this evening), for Super Computing ’09. We’re back in action with our partners Voltaire and Intel, this time showing an enhanced version of the NYSE Technologies Data Fabric 10GigE RDMA demo we built for the Intel Developer’s Forum in September. You can read more about it in our press release or read on for a summary.

For the demonstration, we are using 12 identical, Intel Xeon 5570-based servers with NetEffect 10GigE NICs, running NYSE Technologies Data Fabric and Voltaire VMS, on a real-time Linux kernel. Note: Data Fabric can seamlessly switch between using LDMA, RDMA or TCP to transport data.

On one server, a publisher application generates 1 million, 100-byte messages per second, inserts a timestamp and then sends them to five subscribers on five other servers, all over 10GigE RDMA. One of those subscribers reflects the message back to the publisher box, which then timestamps again and calculates how long the message took.

Meanwhile a different publisher application on a different server generates 50,000, 100-byte messages per second, inserts a timestamp and then sends them to five subscribers on the remaining five servers. These servers use the exact same type of 10GigE NICs only this time Data Fabric is configured to publish using the standard Linux TCP stack rather than using the RDMA iWarp hardware acceleration built onto the NIC. One of those subscribers “reflects” the message back to the publisher box which then timestamps again and calculates how long the message took.

To display everything we have a charting application showing the throughput and 1-second average latency of each transport. Drop by the Intel Booth (#1935) to see the comparison for yourself. Oh… okay… I’ll fill you in here in case you can’t make it. On average, Data Fabric RDMA has a seven times better latency profile than Data Fabric TCP (its lack of jitter is an even bigger improvement) and can handle 20 times the throughput.

So, NYSE Technologies Data Fabric and the MAMA API give users the flexibility to deploy applications with whatever latency profile they need for the business use case, all through a simple configuration change.

For:
• Ultra-Low-latency: Local Direct Memory Access on a single server.
• Low-latency: Remote Direct Memory Access over 10GigE or Infiniband.
• Enterprise Fan-out: TCP over 1GigE.

From Daniel Romanelli, Managing Director, Business Development, NYSE Technologies:

As more and more exchanges are offering direct market access, brokers around the world are looking for solutions to provide pre-trade risk controls. NYSE Technologies has created the Risk Management Gateway (RMG) Suite to meet these demands and provide a flexible deployed system.

We’ve also been winning awards: Bursa Malaysia’s DMA platform for derivatives (which is powered by the RMG) was recently named the “Best Innovation by An Exchange” by the Futures & Options World (FOW) Awards.

And we’re not stopping there: we have recently released an updated Webinar (now archived for playback here) that explains the RMG systems available now for US Cash Equities. In this quick presentation we describe the RMG Direct™ and RMG Service Bureau™ product lines and how they can complement any member firm’s current trading risk management solutions.

During the webinar, a poll of participants confirmed that risk controls are at the top of the financial industry’s agenda:
• 87% of respondents said pre-trade risk management is an important aspect of preventing systematic risk in today’s markets
• In terms of deployment of a risk-management solution for sponsored-access clients, 37% of those surveyed said they are currently in production or have plans to deploy within the next six months.
• Asked what factors are important in choosing a risk management solution, the results were:
o 90%: Latency
o 75%: Total cost of ownership
o 55%: Normalized view of risk
o 50%: Time to market

More to come on this important topic. Please look to this space for future updates and information on the Risk Management Gateway Suite! As always for more information please contact us by e-mailing: NYSE-Technologies-Sales@nyx.com

From Combie Cryan, Head of Business Development, Global Data Products, NYSE Technologies:

The arena of market data is increasingly complex:

Market data volumes increased by over 70% in the past year alone. The continued arrival of new venues and increasing rate of fragmentation of liquidity shows no sign of abating. Fidessa’s fragmentation index in Europe show that investors now need to connect to four or more venues to trade, for instance, in UK blue chips (as opposed to just the one that was necessary a little over two years ago).

Incumbent venues’ fast reactions to new arrivals means that exchange-driven changes — and the demands they place on clients to react — shorten the useful life of infrastructures designed to capture this data. In addition, the traditional vendors increasingly rely on the data feed segment, versus their more mature terminals business, for growth. New entrants are also circling with perceived unique propositions in network flexibility, latency performance, speed to market or customer service.

All this complexity inevitably means more challenges for users in a world where costs of handling data feeds and data center spend and drivers for renewed investment in hardware, software and network infrastructure have never been higher and have never been faced by such a wide cross section of the investment community. The race to be connected in the lowest latent way to as many venues as possible has gone ”mainstream.”

All of this is happening at a time when budgets have never been tighter.

Clients are looking to address these challenges in three main ways:

1. Many are looking to outsource to a third party who can take away the headache of responding to this fast-changing environment, leaving them free to do what they do best: invest.

2. Counterbalancing this, with the collapse of some outsourced service providers in 2008, many clients are being extra vigilant about who they outsource to, with many deliberately choosing multiple service suppliers to minimize impact should a service supplier not last the distance.

3. Given that the rise in volumes and fragmentation is here to stay, many clients are calling a halt to throwing money at the challenge and asking what venues do I need to be on. how fast do I really need to be, and what is the cost benefit of the money spent on that extra micro second or that extra venue?. In short, they are looking to right size their solutions based on hard evidence of what venues and what performance maximizes their return on capital employed.

4. Related to the above, many are looking for the greatest possible transparency.

To mark the launch of its SuperFeed service in Europe, NYSE Technologies has published a white paper on how its clients can look to address these headaches and how SuperFeed may play a key role in reducing cost and complexity while maintaining performance and flexibility. The paper includes a useful tick list of criteria in making data acquisition decision and case study of a client who has recently slashed its market data spend using SuperFeed.

All of this should be great news in these tighter times.

Sounds too good to be true? See for yourself by requesting your copy of the SuperFeed White paper by emailing: NYSE-Technologies-Sales@nyx.com

It’s not every day that we bring you news datelined from a booth at a trade show, so I thought I’d share this:

NYSE Technologies Continues to Enhance SFTI Network
-Customers Enjoying More Destinations, More Capacity, Easier Access and Better Customer Service-

Oct. 21, 2009, Chicago, Futures & Options Expo, Booth #327 – NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext (NYX) and operator of the global Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI®) network, announced that it is making significant enhancements to its SFTI® network [Helpful hint: it’s pronounced “safety.” — Ed.]. Top broker dealer matching facilities and new cloud services for financial institutions will be available over the SFTI network. In addition, the core bandwidth of the network will double, going from 10 to 20Gb. NYSE Technologies also has added remote access via the Internet and a new self service portal for SFTI network customers. Current SFTI® clients can register for free access to this support resource at http://www.nyxdata.com/connectivity.

“Financial services companies who want the industry’s best connectivity solutions are finding the SFTI® network to be a more attractive choice every day. We have a fast-growing business community here, used by more members than ever because of its combination of reach, reliability and speed,” said Ken Barnes, Vice President, Global Connectivity, NYSE Technologies. “A single path connects you to nearly every displayed market - not just the NYSE’s - in the US, and now to the top broker dealer execution facilities, and hosted order routing, market data and computer services as well. More importantly, we’ve made substantial improvements to our customer service operations which are resulting in faster implementations and more intelligent and responsive customer service. Although we’re far from done, we are proud of the results we have begun to deliver with this offering.”

The NYSE Technologies’ SFTI platform continues to be a leader in low-latency connectivity for U.S. trading markets and has aggressively expanded its presence in key trading markets in Europe and Asia. The SFTI network is NYSE Euronext’s highly resilient, ultra low-latency communications backbone created for the use of financial industry participants. It offers connectivity to multiple exchanges, market centers and financial services content providers, including all of the National Market System markets and over 1,300 market participants in the U.S. and others throughout Europe and Asia. The SFTI FIX protocol provides open, standards-based access for data and trading transactions. The SFTI network’s dynamic routing capabilities, supported by the OMS neutral FIX router, enable our members to interact with any destination on the SFTI network through the ease and simplicity of a single FIX connection.

NYSE Technologies will be hosting an informative webinar on Oct. 29 on these latest enhancements to the SFTI network. Please register for “SFTI® Americas: Connectivity Options for an Evolving Marketplace” at http://nysetechnologies.webex.com.

So hey (hey) you (you), get onto our cloud-accessing network. (Forgive me that, Mick and Keith.) Or at least stop by our booth at the show or check out our webinar.

Hope you’re having a wonderful Wednesday. A little hisotical trivia for you:

Today in NYSE History
21 Oct. 1931 — Great Britain abandoned the gold standard, prompting the closing of almost every important European stock exchange.

Also on this day (NYTimes.com): Edison invented the light bulb (in 1879; check out the Times article featuring the classic subheadline, “Conflicting Statements As To Its Utility.” Also, today is the birthday of Steve Cropper of Booker T and the MGs (happy 68th) and Whitey Ford (still looking good at Old Timers’ Days at 81!).