13th January 2012
With the increasing number of outages in key execution venues around the world, business heads and their traders are looking for assurance that their trading platforms are robust, resilient and ready for business.
In recent months, outages have become the bane of traders and operations teams’ lives. They not only have a detrimental impact on the marketplace with the loss of business, but they can also affect the reputation of a firm if they cannot respond quickly to new events. I noticed one exchange that was hit by an outage in December lost a whole day’s trading due to a third party hardware failure in the morning.
I know that no trading operation wants to hear that an exchange is down, particularly when this happens at the start of the trading day. Nevertheless, this is the reality of a growing number of outages caused by technical glitches. Of course, traders want to know where the problem is and quickly understand if this is a street-wide problem or something local to them alone.
Getting an early warning of impending issues makes all the difference. Geneos provides critical insight into and visibility of key performance metrics allowing operations teams to triangulate on multiple performance indicators to determine if an exchange or MTF is fully available.
For example an investment bank that has used Geneos for many years was able to tell from monitoring multiple connection points to a major exchange that it was not only suffering performance issues, but was about to suffer a complete outage based on past performance. The bank’s head of electronic trading was confident enough of his facts to inform his major client of the impending problems 45 seconds ahead of his competition and a full three minutes ahead of the public announcement by the exchange itself.
In meetings with our clients I have been receiving encouraging feedback about the speed and ease at which they can get a real-time picture of their trading infrastructure. A typical example is the automation of routine sunrise checks that used to take hours of operator time. These now take a few moments to check, even via a colour coded display on a Blackberry on the way into the office.
Interestingly, the exchange mentioned earlier didn’t give a specific reason for their technical issues beyond “external hardware”. And, at the time, the FT also reported that “several other exchanges around the world had all suffered temporary glitches as trading venues faced record trading volumes and data message traffic sent across their systems.”
As trading becomes more automated, I believe it’s vital that firms are able to gather business-orientated performance metrics that provide an end-to-end picture of availability from a business perspective that goes beyond the base level technology integrity of the infrastructure. Geneos gives you this ability to see more.
Kevin Covington
CEO of ITRS Group
www.itrsgroup.com
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