In the time that it takes you to read this sentence, approximately 10,000 equity orders and quotes will be sent to the main European equity venues. Approximately 75% of those messages, according to the Financial Times, will be high-frequency trades: short-term positions held for a period of milliseconds or, at most, seconds, and every one of them automatically generated and tracked by a computer program.
Hot on the heels of Colt’s protracted courtship of MarketPrizm comes yet another corporate action in our beloved low-latency infrastructure segment. This one caught us by surprise, but not because it was unexpected. It’s been expected for so long that we’d forgotten about it, to be honest.
Filling a longstanding void at the top of its Sales & Trading business unit, Thomson Reuters has named former IBM general manager for banking and financial markets Shanker Ramamurthy as president, Sales & Trading, effective June 20. The top slot at Thomson Reuters’ largest operating unit, with revenues of $3.5 billion and 2,700 staff, had been open since the departure of Mark Redwood almost a year ago (see more 
Moving up the value chain from networking provider to low-latency solutions partner, Cisco Systems will tomorrow announce its "High-Performance Trading Fabric" initiative, which provides reference architectures for "each step of an automated trade" for financial markets participants.
Deutsche Boerse Group, one of the world’s leading financial exchanges, recently developed a new ultra-low-latency trading infrastructure linking Frankfurt to five other key worldwide trading centres. The target for the Frankfurt-London link was 5 milliseconds (0.005 seconds).
While it may not be the biggest transaction, Colt’s agreement to acquire a majority stake in MarketPrizm, which finally materialised this week after months of speculation, gives the UK telecom services provider some teeth with which it hopes to bite off a larger chunk of the trading connectivity marketplace.
Keeping abreast of the to’ing and fro’ing between the various entities vying for control of NYSE Euronext has added a certain piquancy to simultaneously hosting a panel discussion on Optimising Latency in a Fragmented World at our Business & Technology of Low Latency Trading events this month in London and New York. Assessing the connectivity implications of the current wave of exchange consolidation is a juggling act if ever there was one.
Last week, I chaired A-Team's first Business & Technology of Low-Latency Trading event - #BTLLT for the twittersphere - at The Brewery (a former Whitbread Brewery, it's now an established events venue), and these are a few geeky highlights from my day.