It looks like the trading problem earlier today at Bats Global Markets was caused by commencement in trading of its own shares following its IPO. In a "Post-Mortem" message sent to its members, the exchange said that: "a single matching engine handling symbol range A-BFZZZ encountered a software bug related to IPO auctions which rendered open customer orders in this symbol range inaccessible," and added: "Once the root of the issue was identified as being related to certain Regular Hours Only (RHO) orders, an emergency patch was created to prevent the issue from occurring in a Halt auction."
Bats Global Markets sent a message to its members from CEO Joe Ratterman on Sunday night, noting: "Bats experienced a serious technical failure Friday morning and I want to apologise for not measuring up to the level of excellence that you have come to expect from us. You undoubtedly have heard that we experienced a system problem in our attempt to open the BATS ticker symbol for the first time on Friday morning. We failed to roll into continuous trading with our new BATS ticker immediately following the opening auction. In effect, our newly issued stock did not begin trading as it should and was halted before it ever started trading."
It looks like the trading problem earlier today at Bats Global Markets was caused by commencement in trading of its own shares following its IPO. In a "Post-Mortem" message sent to its members, the exchange said that: "a single matching engine handling symbol range A-BFZZZ encountered a software bug related to IPO auctions which rendered open customer orders in this symbol range inaccessible," and added: "Once the root of the issue was identified as being related to certain Regular Hours Only (RHO) orders, an emergency patch was created to prevent the issue from occurring in a Halt auction."
The need for fast trading is nothing new. The origins of low latency trading are traced to the arbitrage desks of the 1990s, where speed and firepower were directly used to ‘pick off’ mispriced products. It wasn’t long before other markets caught on. Equity markets require low latency because of the widespread use of algorithms and automated trading tools, while fixed income and foreign exchange (FX) markets are highly sensitive to latency due to the extreme liquidity of some instruments and the tightness of the spreads.
Recent announcements by both Celoxica and Redline Trading Solutions point to increasingly latency-sensitive high frequency trading strategies being deployed in the foreign exchange markets. To date, hardware acceleration has been focused on equities, futures and options trading.
In a trading update issued on Monday, networking and latency monitoring specialist Endace said that expected full year revenues would fall short of estimates by 10% and that it had appointed Deutsche Bank to "review options for the future." That usually means a company is open to being - or looking to be - acquired.
With just a week to go before the London Low-Latency Summit, I thought it was the right time to preview what the agenda will bring. Space at the new venue - the America Square Conference Centre - is limited but there's room for a few more delegates, so be sure to 
Performance. We all grow up assessed for it. But in today’s trading environment, how can organisations balance increased regulatory requirements and maximise the efficiency of their core trading functions? Less operational resources means firms are challenged with creating more sophisticated business logic that differentiates them from the competition in the never ending quest for lower latency. As a result, many firms are trying to understand the relative performance of their electronic trade lifecycle with regards to the business requirements. This has created a huge variety of potential avenues for exploration, largely split into two camps: trading strategy performance and systems performance.
Intel has released its Xeon E5-2600 processor family for servers, bringing its 'Sandy Bridge' architecture and Advanced Vector Extension instruction set to enterprise applications, including for low-latency trading.
NovaSparks has added support for an additional five data feeds to its Gen2 appliance, while at the same time outlining the FPGA matrix architecture that the appliance implements in order to handle multiple feeds and application functionality, and detailing its latency profile.