Thomson Reuters Addresses Japan Market Fragmentation with Elektron Launch

In its first Elektron release since last September, Thomson Reuters has unveiled a low-latency data feed offering for the increasingly fragmented Japanese market. The new Elektron feed will provide access to real-time market data from the growing number of Japanese execution venues and platforms, including the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Arrowhead, SBI Japannext, Chi-X Japan, Kabu.com, the Osaka Securities Exchange/Jasdaq and TDX+ Options.

The new feed – launched, Thomson Reuters says, in response to the structural changes in the Japanese marketplace – follows the addition of Elektron hosting in India last summer, underscoring the fact that a lot of current market infrastructure activity is focused on Asia.

The Japanese data feed and Elektron hosting facility will allow market participants to trade on the main Japanese markets, including the alternative trading systems – known in Japan as proprietary trading systems (PTSs) – that have grown in stature following the introduction of Arrowhead.

The Arrowhead trading platform, introduced a year ago to much fanfare, opened the floodgates to advanced trading strategies in Japan, and Thomson Reuters cites analysts' estimates that almost 30% of equity order flow in Japan will be derived from algorithmic trading over the next two years.

The new Japanese feed and hosting offering, says Mike Powell, global head of Enterprise real-time solutions, “will simplify the costs and complexity of high performance access to multiple liquidity pools for our customers. It will also improve time to market and provide a robust solution which will power their trading solutions.”

Local players using Elektron will also be able to connect to its population of more than 350 markets worldwide. Elektron clients can opt for direct data feed access using the Thomson Reuters Data Feed Direct (RDF Direct) feed infrastructures to support their latency-sensitive trading applications.

Thomson Reuters will also offer a feed of consolidated Japanese data for less latency-sensitive applications and trader desktops. The addition of Japan, follows similar launches in Mumbai, India, and in Singapore and Hong during 2010. Elektron is already available for North American and pan-European markets.