Interdealer broker BGC Partners plans to use complex event processing technology from Progress Software Corp.’s Apama division for algorithmic execution in the fixed-income and futures markets.
Under the deal, announced today at the annual Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Fla., Apama’s automated trading system will be collocated with BGC’s eSpeed fixed-income platform in New Jersey. The broker was formed in April 2008 through a merger of Cantor Fitzgerald spin-offs: electronic-focused eSpeed and BGC, which was primarily voice-based.
Philip Norton, executive managing director of e-commerce at New York-based BGC Partners, noted that the Apama technology will help its fixed-income and futures clients “access multiple pools of global liquidity for the execution of their algorithmic trading strategies.” According to the companies, the arrangement will reduce the “investment of time and resources” for traders to automate their strategies.
The partnership “will allow clients to take advantage of the existing infrastructure and get over the barrier to entry into algorithmic trading by not having to build hosting infrastructure, buy servers or get market connectivity,” said Dan Hubscher, senior product marketing manager of capital markets at Bedford, Mass.-based Apama. Firms will also be able to “start trading against the eSpeed market in a very low-latency fashion.”
The agreement follows the merger of Apama competitors Aleri and Coral8, announced March 9. Hubscher called that deal “logical, given that through Coral8 they have a technology and developer focus and through Aleri a capital markets focus.” However, he added, that combination is “something we already have.” CEP provider StreamBase Systems, claiming that it has received enquiries from concerned customers of Coral8 and Aleri, said today that it is starting an “amnesty program” that would allow them to migrate to its software.
John Bates, general manager of Apama, said that “hosted platforms, such as the one we’ve developed for BGC markets, mean that automated trade execution is available to a wider audience.”
On March 10, Progress introduced an application that lets futures spread traders automate their strategies. Dubbed Apama Spreader, the system is based on Apama’s CEP platform and is hosted by Chicago-based FFastFill in close proximity to the major futures exchanges.
Patrick Thornton-Smith, managing director of FFastFill, an electronic trading and risk management technology provider, noted in a prepared statement that Apama Spreader will let trading firms “build multi-leg, multi-instrument, multi-exchange models with links to external modeling tools, charting packages and news feeds on a state-of-the-art system able to handle the ever-increasing amounts of data traffic from futures exchanges.”
This article was originally published at SecuritiesIndustry.com.
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