Delayed LSE Millennium Exchange migration is successful

The London Stock Exchange has migrated its UK cash markets to a new ultra-low latency trading platform, Millennium Exchange.
By None

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has migrated its UK cash markets to a new ultra-low latency trading platform, Millennium Exchange.

Developed by the LSE Group's trading technology business MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan IT firm acquired by the exchange in October 2009, the system went live at 08.00 on 14 February 2011. The LSE has reported that all systems are up and running.

The move to Millennium Exchange was originally scheduled for November 2010, but was postponed to allow members more time to conduct testing, and an outage “in suspicious circumstances” affected Turquoise, the pan-European multilateral trading facility owned by the LSE, following its own migration to the platform in October 2010 from the Cinnober system.

The investigation into the incident on Turquoise eventually returned a verdict of ”human error' as the cause of the outage. The LSE carried out extensive testing of the system during January 2011, with dress rehearsals for its own switch to the platform on 29 January and 5 February.

“This migration is a crucial step forward in our drive to offer best in class trading services and marks a key milestone in the introduction of tightly integrated transaction technology across our markets,” said Antoine Shagoury, chief information officer, LSE Group.

Japanese investment bank Nomura has linked to the LSE with its NXT Direct service, which offers its clients exchange connectivity with a latency of 2.8 microseconds. Nomura had already gone live with NXT Direct across other global exchanges covering US, European and Asian markets.

According to the LSE's figures from trades conducted on Turquoise during the first two weeks of operation on the new system, the MillenniumIT platform has an average order entry latency of 126 microseconds using a native application programming interface, and 196 microseconds using FIX 5.0.

African trading venue the Johannesburg Stock Exchange recently announced plans to implement a Millennium Exchange trading platform on its equity market, in H1 2012.

«