Morgan Stanley has enhanced its Speedway direct market access (DMA) solution for low-latency trading, to enable the faster transfer of data to and from its risk management system.
The latest version of Speedway, which allows risk management checks to be performed on orders at high speed, has been redeveloped to take advantage of the increased performance of hardware over recent years, which it now accesses directly from the software without using the intermediate bridge.
“Every line of code and every inch of wire were reexamined and redone,” said Ari Kaplan, managing director and global head of quantitative client business for Morgan Stanley’s Electronic Trading group. “We are utilising the latest hardware, which represents vast improvement over what was available two years ago in terms of computing power. Memory, network cards, processors are all much faster and we’re leveraging all of it to create a much better product. The entire product, software and hardware have been reengineered with speed in mind.”
Kaplan says that the speed of the checks has not changed but the speed of information transfer has seen performance improved substantially.
“Rewriting the network stack allows you to get the messages into the box to conduct the risk checks and then out of the box very quickly,” he says. “”It has moved from a latency of over 100 microseconds to under two microseconds.”
To reduce latency further, users are able to use the native message formats of exchanges, which are processed more quickly than FIX messages by the venues, and the broker does not modify or change the information in any way.
Kaplan notes that the new version should be available globally by the end of July.
“We're in the process of rolling the enhanced version of Speedway out in Europe and Asia, and the roll-out is expected to be completed by the end of the quarter. There are some minor regional variations in messaging formats but the core technology is the same and latency improvements are uniform,” he said.