Computershare has claimed the record for the fastest stock market surveillance system in the world, more than ten times faster than Nasdaq's SDR system, according to an independent study by the University of New South Wales.
The system, Smarts, examines trading data to look for insider trading, market manipulation, money laundering, breaches of market-maker obligations and other abnormal activity.
Computershare says the latest release of the software, v5.0, reached a transaction rate of 8400 transactions per second in recent benchmark tests. The Australian company says this brings Smarts in at about 14 times that of its nearest rival, the Nasdaq SDR system, which claims a 600 transaction per second peak.
Graham Turner, business development manager at Computershare UK, says: "Smarts is now the fastest system of its kind anywhere in the world. No other surveillance system in the world can process 8400 transactions per second. We deliver alerts, visualisations and associated information to large teams of surveillance analysts within two seconds of events happening in the trading engine.”
For the benchmarking, Smarts processed 1,045,000 transactions of stock-market data from one of its clients in 152 seconds. The data represented a heavy day's trading by the stock exchange in question and was a 'realtime simulation', not a batch process, says Turner.
Clients include the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, Singapore Stock Exchange, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Jakarta Stock Exchange, Oslo Stock Exchange, Oslo Bourse, Stockholm Stock Exchange, Copenhagen Stock Exchange and Micex Stock Exchange (Russia).