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Exchanges in a Race to Zero Latency
Traders Magazine Online News, September 25, 2009
How low can you go?
Nasdaq OMX Group said earlier this month that upgrades to its technology have made it the fastest exchange in the world. That may or may not be true but regardless, the exchange operator's announcement highlights a drive this year by market centers to reduce the latency of their systems.
Behind the trend is the desire to appeal to such latency-sensitive traders as direct market access and algorithmic players. These folks which include high-frequency traders, bulge bracket prop desks and the electronic trading departments of large broker-dealers want their orders processed as quickly as possible.
"If we're not building a low latency competitive exchange, we're just not going to be in the game," Brian Hyndman, senior vice president for transaction services at Nasdaq, said at last week's Aite Group conference on high-frequency trading.
Nasdaq reported on September 9 that upgrades to its INET platform and other parts of the technology that underlie five of its trading venues have given Nasdaq an average latency of less than 250 microseconds. That's faster than BATS Exchange, which pioneered low latency trading. BATS announced in June it executes 80 percent of its orders in under 400 microseconds.
The upshot, according to Hyndman, is that latency has gone down, throughput has gone up and order acknowledgement times are more consistent. "We eliminated the outliers," Hyndman said. "That's very important to a lot of Nasdaq's customers."
This means, Hyndman explains, that a trader won't get an order acknowledgement in 250 microseconds on one trade and three milliseconds another time. "There will be no big spikes in standard deviation," the executive said.
(One millisecond equals one thousandth of a second. One microsecond equals one millionth of a second.)
Besides the changes to INET, whose main feature is the order-matching engine, Nasdaq also upgraded its network to 40 gigabits per second from a 10-gigabit connection; upgraded its hardware; and made a variety of other changes.
Nasdaq's announcement was just the latest. Ever since June, all five of the major U.S. trading venues as well as one in Canada have put out notices describing the steps they have taken to cut their processing times.
On the same day Nasdaq made its announcement, Chi-X Canada ATS, owned by Instinet, claimed it was the fastest market center in Canada.
The ECN said it boosted its capacity to be able to handle 175,000 messages per second, a 500 percent increase from previous capacity of 30,000 messages per second. Chi-X Canada has benchmarked its average response time for marketable immediate-or-cancel orders at about 350 microseconds. That's at least 10 times faster than any other major Canadian market center, it contends. Previously, Chi-X Canada's internal latency was pegged at 890 milliseconds.
"We need to keep up with our customers," Tal Cohen, Chi-X Canada's chief executive, said. "The drive for latency is not slowing down anytime soon."
Chi-X Canada, based on the same technology as Chi-X Europe, launched in February 2008. Cohen said part of Chi-X's strategy to drive latency lower is to run the system on "commodity" hardware. That way, the ATS can simply plug in the newer and faster boxes once they become available.
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