"The dramatic increase in options volumes has made calculating risk statistics an extremely difficult task for financial institutions, particularly for automated trading desks which need to scan the market for more than 1.5 million options records for volatility opportunities," said Frank Piasecki, president and co-founder at ACTIV Financial.

Built on Hanweck Associates' Volera high-performance derivatives analytics engine, VoleraFeed delivers low-latency, real-time implied volatilities and risk parameters for equity, equity-index and futures options. Delivered through the ACTIV Financial API, it covers the entire U.S. OPRA universe of over 1.5 million option records, with Europe and Asia scheduled for the end of 2008.

As a result of this strategic partnership, financial institutions can dramatically reduce their hardware footprint. Automated market-making desks', statistical-arbitrage traders' and risk managers' applications can consume risk characteristics as they would any other market data field and improve on the frequency of the updates for these statistics.

Gerald A. Hanweck, Jr., PhD, founder and principal partner at Hanweck Associates, said, "As Volera delivers extreme, scalable throughput at a fraction of the cost of traditional grid computing systems, it enhances real-time trading and risk analysis of large derivatives portfolios. The ACTIV API enables legacy systems to access the Volera engine from a variety of languages such as C++, C# and Java."

"This is the first time that a hardware accelerated solution has been implemented as a pre-integrated service for implied volatility and risk calculation. Volera complements the existing cost benefits of the Hosted ActivFeed Direct service for ACTIV's clients, offering high performance options analytics by reducing cost, power consumption and data center foot print each by 90 percent, said Mike Dunne, chief technology officerer and co-founder at ACTIV Financial.

The VoleraFeed is available as a content set on the ActivFeed. Custom hosted and on-site solutions can be tailored to meet specific customer needs including bespoke valuation models, dividends, yield curves and hard-to-borrow spreads.