JP Morgan goes live with real-time trading

Investment bank JP Morgan has launched a major stock booking and allocation application to give its clients real-time access to its global equity trading.

The system, named Cheops, is currently running New York, but is due to be rolled out across Europe during 2004, prior to being introduced in Asia.

'We're very committed to staying competitive in this space, which has led us to develop Cheops,' said John O'Hara, vice president and global architect for institutional equities technology.

'It gives our clients seamless access to execute programme trades against our global trading capability, regardless of whether they trade electronically or via older methods like fax or email,' he said.

Cheops manages all trades going into and out of the business and serves as the meeting point between the bank's processing systems, its clients and the regulators.

'We take the orders from our clients, translate them into the electronic domain and submit them to our internal trading systems,' said O'Hara.

The project started 10 months ago, but development speeded up when the bank decided to use a commercial, real-time infrastructure application from software vendor TimesTen, rather than building one from scratch.

'The system is so rapid that you can avoid writing a data caching application, which means you can get your developers to focus on higher level tasks,' said O'Hara.

Data caching is a major factor for delivering high-performance trading applications, but is a complex job for developers, being difficult to code, expensive and error-prone.

The bank has developed a client infrastructure based on Microsoft's .Net, while its servers use Java.

TimesTen runs entirely in the 16GB memory of the bank's Sun Microsystems server, enabling it to keep a number of days of trading data live in memory.