Stock Market technology has been put to the test this week, as
the
financial sector stocks went into freefall.
Robin Paine, chief technology officer at the London Stock
Exchange, described trading levels as unprecedented.
"Periods of high volume trading leads to high loads on all
components of the infrastructure such as networking and CPU
utilisation," he said. "The investments made in technology pay off
at times like this."
The London Stock Exchange increased the average daily number of
trades last month by 48% to 1.2 million compared to the same period
last year.
Firms that provide critical trading data to investors have also
come under pressure.
Jon Cosson, head of IT at stockbroker JM Finn, said the company
is experiencing intermittent problems with the data and trading
software suppliers they use because of the high volumes of
trades.
Brian Taylor, managing director at BTA Consultancy, said the
growth in the number of exchanges under the recent
Mifid legislation has led to an explosion in market data.
"In the old days the shares of a company were listed on one
stock exchange and the information providers would get one update
from one exchange when a company's price changed. Now they get 10
or more for every stock because they are quoted in multiple
venues," said Taylor.
Trading venues have
complex core trading platforms, which enable high volumes of
trades to be processed in milliseconds. This puts pressure on
the IT infrastructures that route, process and store trades and
related information.
