TheLondon Stock Exchangehas increased
its record for the highest value of transactions processed in one
day by more than £4bn in less than six months thanks to
itsTradelect core trading
platform.
The exchange this month processed a record £17.62bn of
transactions in one day on Tradelect, which went live in June,
exceeding the previous high of £17.16bn.
The figures are significantly higher than the previous record of
£13.4bn - set on 28 February, before Tradelect went live - and they
will be seen as a vindication of the new technology platform.
The system, a complex piece of in-house-developed middleware,
reduces the time taken to complete a share trade to 10 milliseconds
and allows 3,000 trades per second.
"Before Tradelect, demand to trade shares would trail off
because the system did not have the capacity to execute orders
straight away," said a London Stock Exchange spokesman.
Recent volatility in the market has increased the volume of
trades said Bob McDowall, senior analyst at TowerGroup. "If it had
not had Tradelect, the exchange would not have been able to cope
with these volumes, but it is now electronically geared up for
this," he said.
The increase in business comes as the London Stock Exchange
prepares for increased competition from rival exchanges.
Project Turquoise, which was set up by seven of the world's
largest investment banks as an alternative to local European stock
exchanges, will compete with the London Stock Exchange for stock
trading business, which accounts for £164m, or 47% of the
exchange's revenue.
Further competition will come from Plus Markets, which was
granted investment exchange status last month, enabling it to trade
in more markets.
Project Boat, which has been developed on the back of the
Markets in Financial Instruments Directive by a consortium of
major banks, will compete with the London exchange on the sale of
market information, which creates 30% of the London Stock
Exchange's revenue - worth about £106m last year.
The exchange is meeting this challenge with Infolect, a system
based on Microsoft .net and SQL Server 2000, which recieves data
directly from Tradelect to generate and sell market
information.