Announcing….. Marketcetera V1.5

Posted on May 18, 2009 by royagostino

Since the release of the Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform 1.0 in January, we’ve brought on several great new board members and got the ball rolling with exciting new customers. And recently, we’ve heard continuing calls for open source from financial services firms trying to navigate a new market with smaller budgets. When Graham and Toli started Marketcetera a couple years ago, they found a hole in the automated trading market and decided to fill it. But while open source was one part of the answer, they believed that high-performance and functionality needs to compliment the unprecedented customizability and accessibility that open source offers traders.

To that end, we’re announcing today the general availability of the Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform 1.5 (www.marketcetera.com). The purpose of this update is to provide even more scalability so that multiple users can collaborate using remote servers to turn trading strategies into immediate executions. The update also allows for monitoring of profit and loss in real time so that traders can adjust to new data as it becomes available throughout the day. Key features of 1.5 include:

  • Real-time intraday position and profit and loss monitoring.
  • Simplicity and security for multi-user installations
  • Level 2 and depth-of-book market data
  • Strategy Studio, allowing multiple agents to build and execute strategies across multiple servers

Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, releases | Leave a Comment »

Seven Months After The Crash

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Toli Kuznets
Dow Jones Index Drop

Dow Jones Index Drop

The September 2008 market crash has certainly shaken up the trading industry.

For buy-side firms and hedge funds in particular, the volatile period over the last seven months has required difficult adjustments. The realities of a new market have challenged the assumptions inherent in hedging practices and federal regulations (such as the short selling ban) have forced firms to radically change how they do business – from trading strategy to cost structures to IT systems. What have we learned?

Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, Trading Trends | Leave a Comment »

A Veteran’s Perspective

Posted on April 13, 2009 by royagostino

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! Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, Trading Trends, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Moving Forward Together in an Open Source World

Posted on February 15, 2009 by royagostino

The financial world is now making way for open source software, and big banks are playing follow the leader. As HSBC, Bank of New Zealand and JPMorgan all announced recently, the open source paradigm is creeping in to their technology architectures. Perhaps we’re witnessing the start of something …. ?

Let’s look at the benefits for buyside traders. Besides the ability to develop trading algorithms and execute orders, open source is lightweight and flexible enough to be deployed 10 times faster than traditional buyside trading platforms at a fraction of the cost. In today’s economic environment, financial institutions are finding that open source is ushering in the brave new world of automated trading. It offers the same robustness as proprietary models without the limitations and costly add-ons required just to make the software work the way you want it to. Plus, it offers enhanced controls for greater transparency into the platform and the code.

Next Thursday, February 19 at 2 p.m. EDT, TABB Group Senior Analyst Kevin McPartland will share his thoughts on the use of open source in automated trading. Kevin, along with our CEO, Graham Miller, will examine how exactly the open source paradigm yields speed, flexibility and competitive advantage for trading firms. Additional topics on the hot seat include:

  • The case against proprietary solutions and the benefits of the open source paradigm
  • Market drivers that affect OMS/EMS purchasing decisions
  • How the financial community is doing more with less as IT budgets crash and burn
  • How to overcome integration headaches and embrace open standards

The webinar is open to all – we just ask that you register at www.marketcetera.com/webinar.

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, Trading Trends | 1 Comment »

Drumroll… Marketcetera 1.0 is now available

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Toli Kuznets

We started Marketcetera a couple years ago on a mission to develop a fundamentally better method for writing, managing and implementing algorithmic trades for hedge fund managers and proprietary traders. Both Graham and I spent ten years managing trading platforms and strategies for Wall Street hedge funds until we couldn’t stand dealing with slow, bulky software anymore. It got so bad that our trading software was actually hindering our best traders from doing their jobs.
Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, releases | 11 Comments »

BusinessWeek.com asks, ‘Will the next Tom Wood please stand up?’

Posted on January 5, 2009 by royagostino

On Christmas Eve, BusinessWeek Online ran an article, “Bring Open Source into Hedge Funds.” Talk about hitting the nail on the head.

The article by Peter Algert, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Algert Coldiron Investors hedge fund, asks for some open-source love for hedge funds. He argues hedge funds are too focused on making money to collaborate on any solution, yet, technology is typically a hedge fund’s second largest expense, after headcount. He writes, “Our ‘secret sauce’ is our trading strategies—it’s not our systems for trading. These platforms can cost even a smaller fund like mine hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year.” Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source, Trading Trends | 2 Comments »

Cost Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software – Will Financial Services Follow Suit?

Posted on December 16, 2008 by royagostino

Earlier this month, Rachael King at BusinessWeek ran a story, “Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software.” The story compares our current recession-driven IT budget crunch to the tech bubble burst, and examines how some large businesses have, and continue to, test out and implement various flavors of open source software to work around shrinking tech budgets.

One of the companies adopting open source is E*Trade. The article kicks off:
“In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. “We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending…and make alternatives to reduce those costs,” says Thompson, vice-president and chief technologist of E*Trade (ETFC). So he began using software that can be downloaded at no cost via the Internet. By the end of 2002, he was saving $13 million a year thanks to use of these freely available applications known as open-source software, and the fact that he could run that software on less expensive hardware.” Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source | 2 Comments »

Continuous Innovation

Posted on November 20, 2008 by royagostino

Hello everyone,

Today we are announcing the release of Marketcetera’s Automated Trading Platform version 0.9.0. Here are some highlights:

Community
As we continue to evolve the product, we have received tremendous community feedback. To further improve our communication and coordination with our community, we are launching new community tools for documentation (Confluence), bug/issue tracking (Jira), code browsing and reviewing tool (Crucible). We would also like to give credit to Atlassian for providing us with free open source licenses for those tools.
Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, releases | Leave a Comment »

Open Source Meets English Lit…

Posted on November 2, 2008 by royagostino

As John Donne once, almost, famously said, “No open source project is an island, entire of itself.” We might have taken some liberties with the exact wording, but we at Marketcetera take the essential meaning to heart: our products do not exist in a vacuum, they are the building blocks of a greater whole consisting of our partners and other interacting vendors.

We’ve built Marketcetera in that spirit, to be a true open source product with a transparency and flexibility that welcomes add-ons. Front office or back, Eclipse or Java, our platform is built to seamlessly plug into the greater functionality that financial service applications can provide. Graham Miller, our CEO, went into a few of the specifics in an interview with ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn last April:
Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source | Leave a Comment »

The Customer’s Perspective

Posted on October 24, 2008 by royagostino

When The 451 Group approached Marketcetera 2 months ago to contribute to a commercial open source report, we weren’t quite expecting the end result to be titled, “Open source is not a business model.”

The analyst firm surveyed 114 open source companies, including Marketcetera, on their business strategies. They sought to answer the question that plagues every open source vendor at cocktail parties and VC pitches alike: “How DO you make money if you give your product away for free?” Read more »

Filed under: Marketcetera, Trading Trends | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.