Equity trading today is as much about being smart as it is about being fast. You may have the best idea or your algorithms may notice trading patterns first, but that doesn’t mean much if you can’t execute faster than anyone else.
This has created a need for speed on Bay Street, and TMX has seen stiff competition from upstarts such as Chi-X whose trading engines can execute in blistering speeds. Yet TMX refuses to give up and on Wednesday the firm announced a massive new upgrade to its Quantum trading engine.
The new technology, known as Quantum XA, is expected to reduce median latency by 20 times to under 100 microseconds and can handle 200,000 orders per second. (Second!)
To put this product together, TMX has spent two years on research and development, and even went so far as to develop a prototype that could mimic TSX and TSX Venture trading.
The new trading engine will be available on TMX Select in early 2013, and on TSX and TSX Venture starting at the end of 2013 -- so there’s still almost two years before most trades use this technology.
