15 Aug 2008
Bank-backed equities trading platform Turquoise went live today following months of delays.
First trades started going through the system at 8am this morning, though chief executive Eli Lederman told Reuters that members would "take a while to get comfortable" with the system and volumes will be small until the first clearing and settlement cycles are completed.
The pan-European equity trading facility was meant to launch in November but the live date was postponed to early 2008, reportedly because of complex contract negotiations with vendors working on the business's core platform.
The MiFID-compliant platform's offering consists of trading in just 10 stocks initially, split equally between the UK and Germany, but Turquoise expects the system to cover some 1,300 stocks across 13 European markets in the next few weeks.
"To achieve our goals we will have to assure the marketplace that the integrated trading platform is functionally reliable, robust and efficient and that it will perform to the highest standards," Yann L’Huillier, chief technology officer at Turquoise told Computing earlier this year.
The launch of Turquoise signals exciting times ahead for the securities market. MiFid is all about introducing greater transparency and efficiency into a market that hasn't changed in structure for 200 years. The introduction of the alternative trading venues, such as Turquoise, promises an exciting and dramatic shift in the market. We will be providing our trading customers with access to all the major new trading venues as they become available. Low latency connectivity is an absolutely critical success factor for all the new venues and their customers as trading strategies become more and more sophisticated. As long as there is the potential to beat competitors to a trade by a milli- or micro-second, low latency is going to be a top IT priority. In a competitive marketplace, it's only going to become more and more important for trading venues, both the traditional and the new ones, to attract customers with a sophisticated ICT infrastructure that can help them succeed. Since we connected to Turquoise, we have seen real demand for our Ethernet connectivity solution. We have signed around 10 top banks and market data providers for connectivity with more in the pipeline.
Posted by: Terry Quigley, head of Financial Services at COLT 18 Aug 2008
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