Low Latency News

As lead traders in large corporate investment firms and banks begin look for more control over their future, many are taking the leap to start their own Proprietary Trading Firms.  Once such newly formed High Frequency Trading firm, came to CFN Services with a challenge. Their goal was to be up and trading within a 30 day window. They had been working with many vendors to integrate a comprehensive solution that would optimize the trading ecosystem from pre to post trade execution.  As they dealt with contracts, vendors and many headaches, they requested of CFN to make this all easier so they could focus on their goals, profitability for their multi-asset trading strategy

Solution:

CFN FAST Platform (Financial Application Services Trading Platform) provided the value to this firm that they required, yet the flexibility and control they insisted on. Through the module approach offered by CFN Services, the trading firm was able to pick and choose the areas they wanted to keep in house and areas they wanted to outsource. They did not need to question their buying decisions as CFN is host/carrier neutral picking the best solution for each specific client. CFN also gave them peace of mind by providing the firm a few solutions with the pros and cons of each clearly articulated. The trading firm also did not want to lock up cash in their trading platform, and with CFN Services was able to implement their full solution with litter capital outlay.

Outcome:

Utilizing CFN expertise and suite of products, this firm was able to greatly reduce the volume of partners and vendors they needed to negotiate and sign contracts with.  This alone provided them the ability to free up to 25 hours a week of the pre-start up time to focus on the core area of the business.  The goal to be up and trading within 30 days was accomplished, without divulging proprietary information. The trading firm acknowledged that CFN helped accelerate the development cycle and allowed then to strengthen their place in the market

To inquire about options for your firm click here

Recently, there has been a lot of information distributed in the industry regarding latency in optical transport systems. This white paper takes an objective look at what really causes latency in transport systems and what to look for in a transport system designed for low latency. Download Now

San Mateo, CA, June 28, 2010 – CFN Services, a world-class low latency managed network infrastructure provider, has been named a winner of the Red Herring 100 North America awards for 2010. The award, whose past winners include Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com, is given to companies demonstrating the ability to disrupt an industry or create an entirely new industry via an innovative business model. The Red Herring 100 North America has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new and emerging companies. redherring_2010_release

CFN Services Expands Low Latency Connectivity and Proximity Collocation in New York, New Jersey and Chicago

Ultra-Low Latency Connectivity and Proximity Collocation offering for local and international financial institutions and vendors looking to participate in the United States equities, futures and options marketplaces

CFN Services has announced their continued commitment to provide lowest latency connections to all Global Exchanges, expanding and improving latencies to 6 new locations in between New York, New Jersey and Chicago. CFN Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure currently supports over 25 data centers spread out across 7 countries.

The newest locations announced are:

NJ/NY Metro

• 5851 Westside Ave., North Bergen, NJ
• 755 Secaucus Rd., Secaucus, NJ
• 120 W. Passaic, Rochelle Park, NJ

Chicago Metro

• 400 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 440 S. LaSalle, Chicago, IL
• 10 S. Canal St. Chicago, IL

CFN Services Low Latency Global Exchange Infrastructure is designed to facilitate trading and information exchange in global capital markets where trade execution speed is critical. The solution offers financial services firms such as brokers, hedge funds, exchanges, asset managers, and pre and post-trade services providers a fully managed, highly available optimized infrastructure, providing easy scalability and growth as trading firms enter new geographies and asset classes.

What is Dim Fiber?
Optical fiber only partially lit in a fiber optic transmission system (FOTS) employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).WDM technology can support a considerable number of wavelengths running simultaneously over a single optical fiber within a cable comprising perhaps a great number of fibers. A dim fiber is one over which not all available wavelengths have been lit and which, therefore, has excess capacity.

Why Dim Fiber?

A dim Fiber customer gets assigned a wavelength in a fiber span that provides flexibility and performance similar to dark fiber with the following benefits:

• Use of fiber span not limited to a specific bandwidth, just a specific wavelength, thus the customer has more control.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing potential outages.
• Reduced equipment on the circuit reducing processing latency.
• Dark Fiber performance at a lower cost.
• Dark Fiber performance with a variety of contract terms closer to customer experience with lit services.

Why CFN Services Dim Fiber Solutions?

• With CFN Services as your partner on your dim fiber plans – CFN will manage and monitor the health of the fiber span via other circuits running on the same fiber span.

• CFN takes away the hassle and worry of managing an Outside Plant Network such as relocations, construction, outages, etc. by managing the full solution so as a customer you get only the benefit of dim without the down side.

• For longer spans, CFN can provide mid-span regeneration reducing equipment, new collocations and operational cost and complexity for the customer.

Contact CFN Services to see if Dim Fiber is the solution for you: Contact CFN Now

Marcy Gordon ASSOCIATED PRESS

Federal regulators on Wednesday imposed new curbs on the practice of short-selling, hoping to prevent spiraling sales sprees in a stock that can stoke market turmoil.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, divided along party lines, voted 3-2 at a public meeting to adopt new rules.

The rules put in a so-called “circuit breaker” for stock prices, restricting for the rest of a trading session and the next one any short-selling of a stock that has dropped 10 percent or more.

Short-sellers bet against a stock, in a practice that is legal and widely used on Wall Street. They borrow a company’s shares, sell them and then buy them when the stock falls and return them to the lender — pocketing the difference in price.

The SEC move followed months of wrestling with the controversial issue. The SEC asked for public comment last April on several alternative approaches to restraining short-selling, and a bipartisan group of senators have been pushing the agency to act or face legislation.

The agency got more than 4,300 comments on the issue.

Investor confidence was shaken as the market plunged amid the financial crisis in the fall of 2008, and proponents of restoring restraints said they were needed to prevent abusive trading. They maintained that the absence of restraints fanned market volatility, prompting hedge funds and other aggressive investors to target weak companies with an avalanche of short-selling.

But opponents said new restrictions could eliminate the benefits of short-selling — bringing capital into the markets and accurate stock prices to the surface — and actually hurt investor confidence.

Under the new rule, once a circuit breaker has been triggered, short-selling in the affected stock will be permitted only if the price is above the current highest bid for the stock. That restriction would apply for the rest of the trading session and the next day’s session.

The SEC said the rule strikes a balance between two objectives: preventing short-sellers from driving the price of a gutted stock even lower and preserving the benefits to investors from legitimate short-selling, such as pumping cash into the market. The balance comes, the agency said, because the circuit-breaker restrictions are temporary and are applied to a specific trading session, in contrast to other alternatives that would institute permanent constraints.

“The reason this rule makes sense is because it recognizes that short-selling can potentially have both a beneficial and a harmful impact on the market, depending on the circumstances,” SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said before the vote.

MS. Schapiro said it is important for the SEC and the markets “to have in place a measure that creates certainty about how trading restrictions will operate during periods of stress and volatility.”

But the two Republican commissioners, Kathleen Casey and Troy Paredes, disputed that the curbs would bolster investor confidence and said they could hurt the market’s efficiency.

MS. Casey said she was “deeply concerned” that the action seemed to be guided more by “public relations” than evidence of the benefit of the rules. It could “undermine our credibility in the long run,” she said.

In July 2007, when the stock market was near its peak, the SEC abolished a 70-year-old uptick rule, put in during the Depression that followed the 1929 market crash that allowed short-sellers to come in only at a price above the highest current bid for the stock.

Last July, the SEC made permanent an emergency rule enacted at the height of the fall 2008 tumult that targets so-called “naked” short-selling — when sellers don’t even borrow the shares before selling them, and look to cover positions after the sale.

That rule includes a requirement that brokers must promptly buy or borrow securities to deliver on a short sale.

Brokers acting for short-sellers must find a party believed to be able to deliver the shares within three days after the short-sale trade. If the shares aren’t delivered within that time, there is deemed to be a “failure to deliver.” Brokers can be subject to penalties if the failure to deliver isn’t resolved by the start of trading on the following day.

February 23, 2010; Herndon, VA (PRWeb) CFN Services, the Low Latency and Infrastructure Optimization Leader, is pleased to announce the completion of extreme low latency metro networking solutions optimized specifically for high frequency trading throughout the New York/New Jersey, Toronto and London financial markets.   In light of market fragmentation and the introduction of new ATS and dark pool options; CFN expands their suite of long-haul optimized solutions for global electronic trading firms by delivering the same advantages of integrated optical connectivity throughout full metropolitan areas. The flexibility inherent in CFN’s managed network enables firms to adapt quickly to changes as execution venues and matching engines move and the landscape continues to evolve.   Firms can now choose either to proximity host at a new venue collocation facility, or central proximity host and take advantage of the robust metro connectivity solutions offered by CFN to maintain the lowest latency without incurring major network conversions involved in data center moves. Read More

Available Now: 2010 Trading Beyond the Horizon

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In 2010, financial markets participants will continue to expand their trading activities as liquidity increasingly becomes fragmented, seeking alpha in new markets, best execution in dark pools, arbitrage opportunities across the order book and by implementing high frequency and complex, multi-leg, cross asset class strategies.

The successful operations – whether they be the proprietary desks of traditional broker/dealers, specialist high frequency and algorithmic traders, or quantitative hedge funds –  will leverage a trading infrastructure that combines high performance analytical, algorithmic and order routing platforms with the lowest latency access to multiple, geographically dispersed execution venues.

Multi-market trading – leveraging a fragmented market landscape – introduces new challenges, even for trading firms that have mastered the complexities of low-latency execution using approaches such as co-location and proximity.  Those mechanisms, while still relevant, provide a less complete solution when trading across markets that are geographically dispersed.

New entrants into the market for connectivity and proximity services include organizations that are themselves market participants, such as sell-side firms offering sponsored access and DMA, and liquidity venues, which are now providing global order routing networks, in some cases channelling order flow to their competitors.

Those service providers join traditional players including telcos, hosting companies and value-added extranet vendors, who often bundle trading applications with connectivity.

The bottom line: For multi-market trading, optimization of long-haul and metro communications links, combined with smart use of co-location, is an imperative for achieving the lowest latency, and this requires an understanding of connectivity offerings at a deep, granular level.

This  industry briefing explains the drivers for fragmentation and multi-market trading, the evolving landscape of market access, and explores connectivity approaches to minimize latency.