From Combie Cryan:

MiFiD (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) has delivered substantial benefits to European traders, most visibly with the introduction of new trading venues, leading to greater choice and competition for execution business in major European stocks. One consequence of MiFiD has been the increased complexity and cost arising from the need to see data from more venues, and indeed the greater presence and sometimes questionable quality or timeliness of over-the-counter post-trade data, much of which had never seen the light of day before MiFiD. Given this, demand for high-quality post-trade data has never been higher.

NYSE Euronext long ago saw and has been responding to this demand, offering its data products in an unbundled format so that data consumers could use “last trade” data independently of best bid and offer or market depth. Indeed, NYSE Euronext split OTC from on-exchange last-trade data. This unbundling is important as many investors, particularly fund managers, want to find the right balance between knowing where the market is at and the cost of handling high volumes of real-time data.

Now, others are following NYSE Euronext’s lead, and this is a positive development for the markets. This month, the London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Borse and NASDAQ OMX joined us in offering unbundled post-trade data, with all exchanges now offering this smaller data set at attractive prices to end users.

In addressing data quality, improving ability of investors to see consolidated data from multiple venues and providing commercial choice in how this data is consumed, including all major European exchanges committing to the free public display of market data after a 15-minute delay, it is clear that competition not only continues to benefit European investors in terms of costs and ease of access, but also provides the optimal platform for continued innovation in the market.

With the European Commission set to consider the focus of MiFiD II later this year, it will be interesting to see how policymakers balance the interests of competition and regulation as drivers of the evolution of markets.

From Combie Cryan:

MiFiD (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) has delivered substantial benefits to European traders, most visibly with the introduction of new trading venues, leading to greater choice and competition for execution business in major European stocks. One consequence of MiFiD has been the increased complexity and cost arising from the need to see data from more venues, and indeed the greater presence and sometimes questionable quality or timeliness of over-the-counter post-trade data, much of which had never seen the light of day before MiFiD. Given this, demand for high-quality post-trade data has never been higher.

NYSE Euronext long ago saw and has been responding to this demand, offering its data products in an unbundled format so that data consumers could use “last trade” data independently of best bid and offer or market depth. Indeed, NYSE Euronext split OTC from on-exchange last-trade data. This unbundling is important as many investors, particularly fund managers, want to find the right balance between knowing where the market is at and the cost of handling high volumes of real-time data.

Now, others are following NYSE Euronext’s lead, and this is a positive development for the markets. This month, the London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Borse and NASDAQ OMX joined us in offering unbundled post-trade data, with all exchanges now offering this smaller data set at attractive prices to end users.

In addressing data quality, improving ability of investors to see consolidated data from multiple venues and providing commercial choice in how this data is consumed, including all major European exchanges committing to the free public display of market data after a 15-minute delay, it is clear that competition not only continues to benefit European investors in terms of costs and ease of access, but also provides the optimal platform for continued innovation in the market.

With the European Commission set to consider the focus of MiFiD II later this year, it will be interesting to see how policymakers balance the interests of competition and regulation as drivers of the evolution of markets.

From Scott Fitzpatrick:

Good morning,

My name is Scott Fitzpatrick and I lead the Order Routing business for NYSE Technologies’ Marketplace. Today, I am excited to announce the introduction of Order Routing Direct, a fully managed point-to-point order routing service, to our Marketplace trading community.

Before diving into the new service, for those not familiar, I’ll give a quick overview of NYSE Technologies’ Marketplace community. This unique group of buy- and sell-side firms is one of the industry’s largest FIX-based trading communities. We have over 1,200 Marketplace member firms representing countries across the globe.

We deliver services to our Marketplace members through fully managed message channels – today more than 10,600 of them – and as the size of our community continues to expand, so does the value of these services as they can connect you to more trading partners and more liquidity.

As for the new service, unlike our traditional connectivity model that uses a centralized hub to manage connections out to trading partners, Order Routing Direct uses patent-pending network technology to allow our clients to seamlessly connect directly to their counterparties via the FIX protocol.

We have recognized that some firms have specific trading requirements that are not fully supported by the traditional hub-and-spoke model and may want to use the connectivity models in tandem. For example, Order Routing Direct may be ideal for a client who wants to have a back-up connection to an important broker or even a lower-latency connection.

I’m happy to discuss the benefits of having these two connectivity models available under one roof, so please contact me at 646.200.8311 or sfitzpatrick@nyx.com with any questions.
Have a great day,
Scott

You can read the full press release on Order Routing Direct here.

From Scott Fitzpatrick:

Good morning,

My name is Scott Fitzpatrick and I lead the Order Routing business for NYSE Technologies’ Marketplace. Today, I am excited to announce the introduction of Order Routing Direct, a fully managed point-to-point order routing service, to our Marketplace trading community.

Before diving into the new service, for those not familiar, I’ll give a quick overview of NYSE Technologies’ Marketplace community. This unique group of buy- and sell-side firms is one of the industry’s largest FIX-based trading communities. We have over 1,200 Marketplace member firms representing countries across the globe.

We deliver services to our Marketplace members through fully managed message channels – today more than 10,600 of them – and as the size of our community continues to expand, so does the value of these services as they can connect you to more trading partners and more liquidity.

As for the new service, unlike our traditional connectivity model that uses a centralized hub to manage connections out to trading partners, Order Routing Direct uses patent-pending network technology to allow our clients to seamlessly connect directly to their counterparties via the FIX protocol.

We have recognized that some firms have specific trading requirements that are not fully supported by the traditional hub-and-spoke model and may want to use the connectivity models in tandem. For example, Order Routing Direct may be ideal for a client who wants to have a back-up connection to an important broker or even a lower-latency connection.

I’m happy to discuss the benefits of having these two connectivity models available under one roof, so please contact me at 646.200.8311 or sfitzpatrick@nyx.com with any questions.
Have a great day,
Scott

You can read the full press release on Order Routing Direct here.

When people in this business talk about electronic messages moving from point A to point B and back in milliseconds — let alone micro or nano or picoseconds — it’s a little hard for me to wrap this old brain around that. I mean, the speed with which things moving across my synapses is probably best measured with, say, an hourglass. Or maybe a sundial.

That’s why I was pleased to see this news about LatencyStats.com, a new website that NYSE Technologies has created with the folks at Corvil, a provider of latency-management systems. I see this as a step in the right direction toward better understanding of latency — what it is, how it’s measured, what’s the significance of it.

I should note up top that LatencyStat.com is about the speed performance of market-data systems, as compared with trading systems. But you can’t have trading without data, so this is a look at one important component of the process. As I said, it’s one step.

Scanning the announcement and the blog attached to the website, and just learning about all of this, already there are a number of aspects of this idea that I like:

• It creates greater transparency. There’s real-time snapshots about how fast data is flowing from participating markets. Right now, that’s just our markets, but I’ll get to that in a second.

• It’s open. We’re inviting other markets to join us so that customers can compare data on an apples-to-apples basis. This could help create industry-wide standards, and having the participation of Corvil, a neutral and recognized authority in the field, advances that goal.

• It’s free and easy to use.

• It’s first. There’s nothing else out there like this.

• Customers can help drive this move toward transparency and standarization. As my colleague Mark Schaedel says on his blog post:

“To those markets that are reluctant to match, consider this – your customers have already formed their own opinion about your latency performance and that opinion was formed from their own experience. It is likely that the truth lies somewhere in between what you consider as fact and what they have concluded from their own experience. Everyone will benefit from a central source for information about latency and we’re excited to get started!”

More to come on this, I’m sure. In the meantime, check it out online, or see my colleagues at the SIFMA Tech Conference, now through 24 June.

When people in this business talk about electronic messages moving from point A to point B and back in milliseconds — let alone micro or nano or picoseconds — it’s a little hard for me to wrap this old brain around that. I mean, the speed with which things moving across my synapses is probably best measured with, say, an hourglass. Or maybe a sundial.

That’s why I was pleased to see this news about LatencyStats.com, a new website that NYSE Technologies has created with the folks at Corvil, a provider of latency-management systems. I see this as a step in the right direction toward better understanding of latency — what it is, how it’s measured, what’s the significance of it.

I should note up top that LatencyStats.com is about the speed performance of market-data systems, as compared with trading systems. But you can’t have trading without data, so this is a look at one important component of the process. As I said, it’s one step.

Scanning the announcement and the blog attached to the website, and just learning about all of this, already there are a number of aspects of this idea that I like:

• It creates greater transparency. There’s real-time snapshots about how fast data is flowing from participating markets. Right now, that’s just our markets, but I’ll get to that in a second.

• It’s open. We’re inviting other markets to join us so that customers can compare data on an apples-to-apples basis. This could help create industry-wide standards, and having the participation of Corvil, a neutral and recognized authority in the field, advances that goal.

• It’s free and easy to use.

• It’s first. There’s nothing else out there like this.

• Customers can help drive this move toward transparency and standarization. As my colleague Mark Schaedel says on his blog post:

“To those markets that are reluctant to match, consider this – your customers have already formed their own opinion about your latency performance and that opinion was formed from their own experience. It is likely that the truth lies somewhere in between what you consider as fact and what they have concluded from their own experience. Everyone will benefit from a central source for information about latency and we’re excited to get started!”

More to come on this, I’m sure. In the meantime, check it out online, or see my colleagues at the SIFMA Tech Conference, now through 24 June.

From Feargal O’Sullivan:

By now I hope you’ve all seen one of my previous blog postings on the 32-core ‘Trading-in-a-Box’ demo we showed at the Intel Developers Forum and FIF Options Conference last year, or at least watched our April Webinar where we showed it live on one of the first production servers available.

Well, earlier this week our friends at IBM were kind enough to provide us with two Intel Xeon 7500 (aka Nehalem-EX) servers, joined via QPI interconnect to create a truly ‘glueless’ 64-core server capable of running all the feed handlers, tick capture engines, analytics, algos and market access gateways you could want (at least until next year)… all on one box!

Come by Booth#:1438 at the SIFMA Technology Expo on Tuesday-Thursday next week (June 22-24) and check out this impressive piece of machinery running all the software you need for a low-latency trading solution. We’ll be showing a number of our Market Data Platform V5 feed handlers publishing to a OneTick tick capture engine, which will run some analytics and issue trade orders to our Market Access Gateways, all communicating via Data Fabric Local Direct Memory Access. This won’t be maxed out and optimized yet because we only got the server up and running this week but we do plan to bring it back to the office and kit it out with the ultimate in trading solutions over the coming weeks. Stay tuned because we’ll definitely give you a chance to see that final solution when we’ve got it humming.

From Feargal O’Sullivan:

By now I hope you’ve all seen one of my previous blog postings on the 32-core ‘Trading-in-a-Box’ demo we showed at the Intel Developers Forum and FIF Options Conference last year, or at least watched our April Webinar where we showed it live on one of the first production servers available.

Well, earlier this week our friends at IBM were kind enough to provide us with two Intel Xeon 7500 (aka Nehalem-EX) servers, joined via QPI interconnect to create a truly ‘glueless’ 64-core server capable of running all the feed handlers, tick capture engines, analytics, algos and market access gateways you could want (at least until next year)… all on one box!

Come by Booth#:1438 at the SIFMA Technology Expo on Tuesday-Thursday next week (June 22-24) and check out this impressive piece of machinery running all the software you need for a low-latency trading solution. We’ll be showing a number of our Market Data Platform V5 feed handlers publishing to a OneTick tick capture engine, which will run some analytics and issue trade orders to our Market Access Gateways, all communicating via Data Fabric Local Direct Memory Access. This won’t be maxed out and optimized yet because we only got the server up and running this week but we do plan to bring it back to the office and kit it out with the ultimate in trading solutions over the coming weeks. Stay tuned because we’ll definitely give you a chance to see that final solution when we’ve got it humming.

From Feargal O’Sullivan:

You saw the Intel Developer’s Forum video in September and you came to the FIF Options Conference to see the live demo in October – now get ready for today’s launch of our “Trading-in-a-Box” solution running on the Intel Nehalem-EX based, 32-core server.

Today, Stanley Young, NYSE Technologies CEO, and I will attend Intel’s major 2010 release announcement in San Francisco for the new Intel Xeon 7500 Series processors (a.k.a. Nehalem-EX). Stanley will take the stage to present our vision for a liquidity-hub data center full of low-latency trading applications pushing the efficiency of capital markets to the next level. The highlight will be discussing how trading firms can collapse their algorithmic trading applications onto one, Xeon 7500-based server that has 32 CPU cores, thereby bypassing the network entirely and allowing for the absolute low-latency solution possible.

Stanley’s presentation will be part of a Webcast that begins at 2 pm EST; he’s expected to start about a half-hour into it, give or take, but try to catch it from the beginning so you pick up the full context. You can watch it all here.

I’ll write about it after the event but mark your calendars now for our April 29 Webinar where we’ll be showing a demo of a production-ready version of our Trading-in-a-Box solution. More on this in a future posting.

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.