WallStreet & Technology touches on an interesting topic relating to last weeks near 1,000 point fall in the Dow in late US trading.

Data released by Gomez Inc (see chart at end of article), shows many on-line trading platforms struggled to cope with the resulting surge in investor activity, with some platforms showing a 10 fold increase in the time taken from log-in to trade execution, compared to ‘normal’ market conditions. Such delays can rapidly kill hard won client loyalty for a platform.

I am sure senior management at many of those platforms are struggling to understand why their platforms were unable to scale sufficiently to support user numbers under conditions of extreme market volatility, without excessive latency and delays being introduced.

This clearly highlights the importance at the design stage of ensuring that the platform has been architected for scalability and performance, even under the most extreme market conditions.

Rigorous automated performance and regression testing should be incorporated into a continues build process testing performance and functionality at every phase. Prior to go-live comprehensive stress testing must be carried out, throughout the entire platform stack, to ensure pricing, trading and all end user GUI functionality is performing to acceptable levels and within agreed latency thresholds.

As the graph below shows, time spent in final UAT testing, will be worth its weight in gold!