In March, RTS introduced a series of significant technology enhancements to its RTD and eRTD front-end trading systems. The RTD Realtime Trading Desktop is the firm’s high-performance trading platform. eRTD is a Java-based front-end, offering RTS clients and their customers an Internet solution to access both equity and derivatives markets globally.

The customer-driven technology changes provide new capabilities in performance, performance measurement, Smart Order Routing, options volatility management and market data efficiency.

“We are pleased to offer these enhancements to our front-end trading solutions, based on valuable input from our clients,” said Steffen Gemuenden, CEO at RTS.  “As the global financial landscape presents new challenges to many users of our services, we are committed to offering powerful, easy-to-use technology that helps expand capabilities while focusing on improving efficiencies.”

Performance & Performance Measurement

The need for speed: Efficiencies beneficial for algorithmic traders

The technology enhancements have made RTS interfaces to execution venues and liquidity pools faster and more resilient, with major improvements in the RTD core infrastructure. The upgrade has achieved improved memory capacity and processing efficiency as well as higher throughput.

The volume of market data has grown significantly on a global basis over the last several years. According to some exchanges, today’s market maker activity can result in up to 14 changes per second in the order book for a single strike price. Multiplying that across all strike prices and different options series for one exchange alone can quickly turn into a challenge for any software. With that challenge in mind, RTS has improved on its market data capabilities across exchanges with market data subscription rules that are more efficient and flexible. "The upgrade includes three to four times more market data processed than previous versions of RTD", said Mark van Vugt, Executive Board Member who is responsible for Europe.

Many RTS customers wanted to measure their performance, particularly after the introduction of so many performance enhancements. The firm has introduced greatly improved performance measurement functionality in its core system. Making use of the Communication Server measurement capabilities is important in helping users understand how time in the server is spent.   

In addition, users of RTD can now rely on improved processing of contract additions and updates, as well as settlement prices. RTS has also reduced the impact of the processes of trading phase changes on other processes, reducing CPU load. Under the new technology, market phase changes are processed in the core system only if a client is present and requesting the information.

The newly integrated system-wide market subscription considerably reduces the number of market updates sent out by the interface. It minimizes the network load, as well as the load on the server. Traders processing a significant number of market updates per second will experience and benefit from the enhanced market data handling. The enhancement minimizes the risk of a CPU overload, reducing consumption of the Communication Server by up to 50 percent. Contract update processing time is nearly twice as fast, as tested in a production environment.

RTS has also introduced enhanced on-demand market message processing and market data subscription, improving speed and efficiency for all market data subscribers. Any RTS client can request market data of interest for a specific contract or exchange (or for a particular trading session). This service was introduced to substantially decrease the load between the Communication Server and the interface to considerably reduce overhead of processing market data in the RTD infrastructure.

Smart Order Routing

As RTS has offered access to a broad range of multi-lateral trading facilities (MTFs) in Europe, customers now can use the Smart Order Routing (SOR) module that is integrated into the front-end technology. SOR is particularly important where instruments are listed on multiple trading venues, such as the equities trading on MTFs. SOR scans the market for the best-displayed price and routes orders to that market for execution. RTS’ SOR module provides support for exchange-prioritized order routing, on a per user, per symbol hierarchical basis. The module is available not only for users of both RTD and eRTD, but also those who connect via the RTD API (application programming interface). Additional capabilities to the SOR module will be added subsequently as Smart Order Routing continues to grow rapidly in both European and US markets, driven largely by regulations such as MiFID in Europe and Regulation NMS in the US. SOR is fully integrated with all other RTS technology, including RTD Tango, order emulation via the Automatic Order Manager, and internalization via the Internal Order Matcher (IOM). Customers using the RTD API can route their orders via the SOR exchange.

Did you know that…

• RTS provides connectivity to the most successful MTFs
  Chi-X, Turquoise, BATS, Nasdaq Europe and ARCA Europe?

• All MTFs are available as DMA solutions in RTS’ Datacenters?

Volatility Manager for Options

RTS has long been known for its powerful and versatile options functionality.  The newest offering is a re-design of the Volatility Manager, also known as Vola Manager. This technology provides customers with a more accurate and easy-to-use mechanism for pricing out-of-the-money options. The new Vola Manager controls are more intuitive for the user, offering a broad range of new features and enhancements. New features include the ability to import and export data; extended parametric interpolation functionality and configurations capabilities; a new configuration parameter, including the ability to smooth for “up-cuts” and “down-cuts”; the ability to filter out bad volatility points, i.e., those far away from the standard deviation curve; and a new view for Term Structure.

Enhancements to the previous Vola Manager include improved graphical displays (GUIs) and a centrally placed dialog box to easily access major functions. The implied bid or ask volatility now displays separately, distinguished by different colors, and volatility scores are combined by lines that are separate from the fitting model in use. Customers can also interpolate and extrapolate volatilities from unknown option prices.

Vendor of Record

To accommodate regulations at various exchanges, such as the London Stock Exchange, RTS has implemented Vendor of Record (VoR) functionality. VoR provides the ability to limit or monitor market data subscriptions for each of their RTD users. Effectively this tool enables users to further customize market data subscription (down to the level of a single user), through filtering, monitoring and paying for market data “per view only”.

eRTD

Key enhancements to eRTD includes an integrated pop-up Order Ticket for flexible order entry. The feature allows users to open the ticket by a single click on the bid/ask and to change it by clicking an active order. Rather than using the current Order Input Line at the bottom of the screen, traders can now send order via an adjustable pop-up window.

eRTD also include a new “tree-based” symbol selection, giving customers the ability to search for contracts easily using the Tree Search tab. The feature displays contracts in groups according to their categories and subcategories, offering yet another method to search for tradable instruments from across 100+ exchanges.

For more information about these enhancements, contact your local representative or go to www.rtsgroup.net to check out upcoming RTS webinars and seminars.