This week’s blog post comes from W. Brennan Carley, our newest Board member…
I am very excited to have recently joined the board of Marketcetera. Several colleagues have asked why I joined the board, so here is what I found so compelling about Marketcetera:
First, the team at Marketcetera has come up with a platform that will revolutionize trading. Early in my career I left IBM to join Instinet when I saw how it was changing the way the world trades by introducing the first ECN… Automating the process of matching orders. Radianz was a revolution in connectivity, providing a standard (outsourced) platform to connect to liquidity centers around the world. What I see in Marketcetera is similarly game-changing.
Specifically, Marketcetera is doing two fundamental things that are significant:
• Marketcetera has built a Trading PLATFORM. Until now, strategy driven traders had two choices: They could either build an entire system from scratch, which means that they would have to recreate a lot of the “plumbing” that was not value-add. Or they could buy a system from a vendor, spend a lot of time and money customizing and implementing that system, risk vendor lock-in, and share their proprietary trading strategies with the vendor. Of course they would have to do it all again when they needed to update their strategy.
With the Marketcetera platform, all of the necessary infrastructure is built into the platform: real-time low latency market data processing, automated parsing of market data and FIX messages, complex event processing to support correlation of factors that lead to a trading decision, automated generation of FIX messages, order routing to deliver orders and receive execution notices, and a toolkit to build strategies in various scripting languages (java, python, ruby). The trader can leverage this foundation and quickly build and deploy his strategy.
• By embracing open source, Marketcetera has made it much easier for traders to modify the platform to optimize it for their needs. This can range from small changes that make a particular strategy easier to implement, to larger changes like addition of asset classes or other sources of data. The general media focuses on the cost saving benefits of open source, and the advantages of a community that contributes (the “bazaar” model versus the “cathedral”.) While these certainly apply, a much more subtle but profound benefit from the open source model is that it allows traders to be agile in response to changing markets, to protect their own intellectual property, and to retain a competitive advantage in their alpha generation. Paradoxically, by building an open source platform, Marketcetera has enabled its users to protect their intellectual property better than any closed system would! (more…)
Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, Trading Trends, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
