Three of Canada’s equities trading venues have enhanced their platforms’ technical performance as the demand for low-latency trading infrastructure grows in the country.
Chi-X Canada, the alternative trading system (ATS) operated by Chi-X Global, has teamed up with network-neutral data centre and Internet exchange service provider Switch and Data for connectivity and co-location services.
Co-location enables market participants to place their trading engines as close to the exchange’s matching engine as possible. By reducing the physical distance data is required to travel, latency to the exchange is also decreased.
From the end of Q2 this year, Chi-X Canada will use Switch and Data’s Toronto Financial EcoCenter as its primary data centre.
“By virtue of its downtown location, our Toronto Financial EcoCenter sits at the terminus of several of the long-haul fibre optic cables originating in New York and Chicago,” said John Panzica, vice president, financial services practice for Switch and Data.
Meanwhile, market data appliance supplier Exegy has built market data feed handlers into its ticker plant to process data from the Omega ATS trading platform. As a result, Exegy clients will be able to access the ATS’s trading data using its hardware-accelerated market data appliance.
“Our high-frequency trading customers noted that competitive markets and low-cost execution has come to Canada, the world’s fourth-largest trading market. That is why we have tuned our product for Canadian data,” said Jeff Wells, vice president of product management at Exegy.
“The ability to obtain fast, direct feed data from Omega ATS will continue to be important to market participants as we continue to attract more and more high-frequency traders to the Canadian market,” added Greg King, chief operating officer at Omega ATS.
Finally, TMX Group, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), Montreal Exchange and Boston Options Exchange, has completed the implementation of its new TSX Quantum Order Entry Gateway.
The new gateway will improve order response times five-fold and is designed to support the continuing increase in messaging rates and performance demands from the trading community in Canada. TMX Group is also upgrading its internal networks to improve throughput capability as well as expanding its messaging capacity. The first phase of expansion is due to be completed in the coming months.
“With the rapid pace of change in technology and the nature of trading on Canadian equity markets continuing to evolve, it is imperative that we make the investments necessary for the success of our business in the near and longer term,” said Kevan Cowan, president of TSX Markets and group head of equities.