Gain Launches GTX ECN for FX; Leverages Forexster Platform

Gain Capital, best known for its retail Forex.com portal, is today launching GTX, a foreign exchange electronic communications network (ECN) aimed at the professional marketplace for FX trading, including financial institutions, hedge funds, CTAs, high frequency traders, broker/dealers and high net worth individuals. Gain is tapping technology from Bermuda-based Forexster to underpin the new initiative.

GTX is an anonymous trading platform that offers direct access and trade execution capabilities via streaming prices or Request-For-Stream (RFS), with a transparent view of both price and order book depth.

“With an eye toward expanding our already strong presence in the institutional space, we recognised a need for a dedicated liquidity venue that gives FX traders greater price transparency, instantaneous trade execution and lower transaction costs,” says Glenn Stevens, CEO of Gain.

Unlike existing FX trading platforms, Gain believes its approach of allowing a diverse group of participants to engage in the marketplace will differentiate it and ensure all-important liquidity. Access to GTX is allowed via GTX Prime to Prime, for companies that have pre-existing credit with a prime broker, and Gain Capital Direct Prime, for those without pre-existing relationships.

GTX offers an intuitive user interface, designed to make it straightforward to manage orders, query trades, and view deep pricing from anonymous and disclosed liquidity providers.

Other capabilities include:

* Aggregate pricing from a hybrid pool of anonymous or disclosed liquidity providers
* Price depth with automatic size-adjusted average price (VWAP) display
* Order management; market, limit, stop, OCO, peg order types
* Two types of order routing: targeted or automatic based on a participant’s trading strategy
* Algorithmic plug-ins and trigger/if-done/auto-exit logic ideal for high frequency trading
* Access via the FIX protocol, or a Java API
* Real-time Straight Through Processing (STP) and historical trade query

While Gain has no plans to offer a consolidated data feed via market data aggregators, GTX will provide a feed of trades executed to clients, provided via the FIX or Java APIs, via Traiana's post-trade processing platform, or through the Java-based workstation interface. GTX uses technology from Forexster, a Bermuda-based FX trading technology company founded in 2001 by Arman Glodjo, a then hedge fund owner who invented and patented a method for trading OTC instruments, dubbed Network Dealing. F

orexster's mission is to commercialise those ideas for the FX market, with development led by Scott Harrington and Nathan Bronson, who also worked at Glodjo's hedge fund before focusing full time on Forexster. In particular, GTX has implemented Forexster Release 6.0, configured for the Gain's specific credit relationship structure.

That includes the server-side matching engine, credit engine, market data distribution infrastructure, liquidity provider adapters, and post-trading reporting to prime brokers as well as the client-side FIX and Java APIs and workstation. The Forexster server software provides transaction management and business logic and acts as an ACID-compliant in-memory database, spread across a cluster across multiple machines.

It uses the open-source PostgreSQL database for persistence, and is written mostly in Java with pre-compilation options and native C++ code for better latency in sensitive code paths. Multi-shadow Speculative Concurrency Control (MSCC) is used for scalability to increase throughput of simultaneous orders without sacrificing latency for any single order.

GTX's implementation - running on Intel servers and the Linux operating system - has been stress-tested processing 10,000 price updates per second, and delivers 500 microsecond market data transit time, five millisecond order placement turnaround time and 12 millisecond local-match turnaround time.

Founded in 1999, Gain operates the popular Forex.com platform for the retail segment, although it also offers a white label trading platform to financial institutions as well as execution and clearing services to institutions. It currently operates in some 140 countries, and transacts $200 billion per month.