Trading Platforms

Details

Category: Trading

Trading Platform is a mainframe software application with user interfaces for entering buy and sells trades. It routes trade orders from a computer screen in front of an individual trader to the securities exchanges, such as New York Stock Exchange or New York Mercantile Exchange. In finance, an Electronic trading platform is a computer system that can be used to place orders for financial products, such as shares, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives with a financial intermediary, such as a brokers, market makers or stock exchanges over a network. Such platforms allow electronic trading to be carried out by users from any location and are in contrast to traditional floor trading and telephone based trading.

Electronic trading platforms typically stream live market prices on which users can trade and may provide additional trading tools, such as charting packages, news feeds and account management functions. Some platforms have been specifically designed to allow individuals to gain access to financial markets that could traditionally only be accessed by specialist trading firms such as allowing margin trading on Forex and derivatives such as contract for difference or to trade strategies based on technical analysis. The term 'trading platform' is generally used to avoid confusion with ‘trading system’ which is more often associated with the trading method or strategy rather than the computer system used to execute orders within financial circles.

Turquoise is an equities trading platform (Multilateral trading facility or MTF), created by nine major investment banks. The consortium hopes the system will provide dealing services at a 50% discount to traditional exchanges. It is a hybrid system that allows trading both on and off traditional exchanges. The system is advertised as a "pan-European platform that will be based in London." The banks involved are: BNP Paribas, City, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Society Generals and UBS. The groups have selected EuroCCP to provide clearing and settlement services. The group selected Sweden's Cinnabars as its trading platform. Turquoise developed a real-time market surveillance system "to capture breaches of trading rules and root out market irregularities." The system is based on the Progress Agama Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platform.