18 June 2007

TradElect, the London Stock Exchange's new electronic trading system, has gone live.

The new technology platform has been developed using the Microsoft .NET Framework, with support from Microsoft and Accenture, and marks the final phase of the Exchange's four-year Technology Road Map project. TradElect enables significant increases in both speed of trading and system capacity.

"The introduction of TradElect, the culmination of a four year investment in next generation technology, will deliver a step change in trading capabilities to the London market," said David Lester, chief information officer at the Exchange. "As high-frequency algorithmic traders look globally for pools of liquidity in which to find alpha opportunities, TradElect sets new benchmarks in terms of system capacity and performance."

The exchange made the strategic decision to replace its technology rather than adapt existing, outdated technology. Customers have had access to test environments for the past nine months, and the past two months have seen three market weekend dress rehearsals to prepare market systems for cutover.

TradElect enables the market to execute trades fully and resiliently in around ten milliseconds. This builds on the performance of the Exchange's information dissemination platform, Infolect, which was launched in October 2005 and provides the market with a full-depth view of company prices within two milliseconds. These levels of performance should drive further increases in trading volume and allow new market strategies to be applied in London.

TradElect also increases the Exchange's capacity, initially fivefold, to enable significant trading growth. TradElect's capacity would be sufficient to handle the current trading transactions for all European equities, and the system enables the Exchange to further double capacity on demand, at less than one fifth of previous costs.

The new platform has been designed to the highest levels of resilience with comprehensive back up, which includes dual processing at two sites and recovery from component failure within a second.

"TradElect's launch underlines the Exchange's commitment to invest continuously to improve market efficiency for the benefit of all traders, investors and listed companies. Together with a long-standing reputation for full transparency of information, strong regulation and progressive fee reductions, the London markets are underscoring their leading global position," said Lester.

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