Marketcetera ships automated trading platform

This first production-ready release of the most popular open source trading platform for traders, hedge fund managers and broker/dealers offers new features that include robust complex event processing (CEP) capabilities and enhanced strategy development for faster testing and deployment of algorithms.

"We've been working with customers, developers and the open source community for more than two years in developing our core trading platforms," said Graham Miller, CEO of Marketcetera. "With our first prime time release, we're now able to support trading customers at financial services institutions of all sizes with the features, mission-critical support and services they need to respond to new regulations on the fly and to adapt to changing market conditions more quickly with new strategy implementations."

Backed by Shasta Ventures and strategic angel investors, Marketcetera was co-founded in 2006 by Stanford University computer scientists, Graham Miller and CTO Toli Kuznets, after 10 years of managing trading platforms and strategies for Wall Street hedge funds. Dissatisfied with lengthy implementations and high maintenance costs for proprietary automated trading software, Miller and Kuznets partnered to build a lightweight and flexible platform that could be deployed 10 times faster than traditional trading systems and at a fraction of the startup and maintenance costs.

Marketcetera's Automated Trading Platform is standards-based and modular, with open APIs and support for multiple development languages. It consists of three offerings:

• Photon, a visual end-user interface (GUI) that controls and monitors trading activities;
• Marketcetera Trading Server (MTS) that enables order routing and database management;
• Customized services that include pricing logic, integration tools and more.

The release of the Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform is built on the popular open source project developed by Marketcetera, which has been downloaded more than 10,000 times and is currently in production deployments at more than 20 financial institutions. Users can download and deploy the software free, or purchase commercial support, certified broker connections and market data adapters from Marketcetera.

"Marketcetera has captured with great clarity what an emerging high technology hedge fund is looking for," said Astro Teller, CEO of Cerebellum Capital, a West Coast-based quantitative hedge fund. "Their software is open, clear, powerful, broker-independent, and simple to get up and running."

Marketcetera Automated Trading Platform Version 1.0 adds key new features, including:

• Complex event processing capabilities with Esper implemented as the CEP engine, simplifying calculations like "moving average" and enriching market data triggers to include higher level events such as "S&P 500 up 50";
• Improved strategy API with support for Java and Ruby and new and easy APIs for orders, market data, positions, execution reports and more;
• Enhanced performance and scalability with headless deployment to reduce overhead and improve latency and memory usage;
• Simplified integration with existing IT infrastructure with new modular framework for real-time data feeds and snap-in analytics, support for server side agents and Photon GUI as well as web services interfaces as part of new client APIs;
• Improved support for multiple simultaneous broker connections with broker notifications and availability through Photon;
• Enhanced UI with new configurable desktop notifications, dynamic trade suggestions and more.