Moscow Exchange to launch new trading platform on FORTS and Standard in fall
MOSCOW. Sept 7 (Interfax) - Moscow Exchange MICEX-RTS plans to launch a new trading platform by the end of the year on the former RTS exchange's FORTS and Standard markets, the exchange's information technology director, Vagan Vardanian told reporters Thursday on the sidelines of a conference on robot trading.
This will be Moscow Exchange's first major project to integrate trading floors. MICEX and RTS legally merged on December 19, 2011.
A presentation of the new trading platform will be held for trading participants on September 14.
Vardanian declined to provide details about the new platform prior to the presentation, and said only that it will increase productivity and the stability of trading.
In May, Vardanian said that the exchange plans to launch a new version of the FORTS trading platform at the end of the third quarter or beginning of the fourth quarter of 2012. "We hope that this will make it possible to reduce the number of abnormal situations and reduce delays in transaction processing. A decision has already been made to test the system before the start of trading in the early hours of the morning, using employees of the merged exchange at the branch in Novosibirsk due to the time difference," he said at the time.
The platform does not have a new name yet. "We will hold an open competition for a new name for the platform. The winner will get a prize," Vardanian said.
The FORTS and Standard markets currently operate on the Plaza trading system.
Two market participants told Interfax that the exchange plans to launch the new platform in the second half of October or in November.
"This system could become the basis for the new trading platform in general for all the exchange's markets," one of them said.
Vardanian said earlier that Moscow Exchange plans to launch a new trading system in 2015, and needs to decide whether it should support the two existing systems (MICEX and RTS) or choose one.
He said at the time that the new trading system must meet three criteria: it must be fail-safe, fast and productive. In terms of productivity, the exchange plans to increase the number of transactions processed by the system per second by many times over. Right now the system's productivity is 20,000 transactions per second with a peak load of 3,000. "We want to bring it up to 200,000-300,000 transactions per second without a reduction of the reaction time," Vardanian said.