Turquoise, the pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) owned by the London Stock Exchange (LSE), has said that its Millennium Exchange trading engine is “the fastest in the world”.
Turquoise switched from its previous trading platform supplied by Swedish technology firm Cinnober on 4 October to a new engine developed by MillenniumIT, the Sri Lankan software provider purchased by the LSE for US$30 million last year.
After two-and-a-half weeks of using the new platform, the MTF says that the average order entry latency on Turquoise is 126 microseconds using a native application programming interface, and 196 microseconds using FIX 5.0.
Turquoise added that 99.9% of all customer orders on the new system are accepted, processed and acknowledged within 400 microseconds.
“We believe Turquoise's trading platform is the fastest in the world,” said David Lester, Turquoise's CEO, at the European Exchange Summit held in London on 20 October. “Our speeds are now double that of our nearest competitors such as BATS Europe and Nasdaq OMX on a like-for-like basis.”
The MTF's new technology platform has run into teething problems since it launched on 4 October, including internal network issues on 5 October, which caused Turquoise to start trading at 09.15, an hour and fifteen minutes after the standard market opening.