TradElect

» see londonstockexchange.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

TradElect was the matching engine of the London Stock Exchange from June 2007 to February 2011. Accenture built it, the exchange paid something in the region of forty million pounds for it, and it ran on Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 underneath, on HP ProLiant hardware. For a few years, the price of every share traded in London was decided by a .NET application.

That sentence is why anybody outside the City remembers it. In 2007 the Microsoft stack was a completely reasonable choice for a large enterprise system and TradElect was, on the numbers it was built to hit, a success. Its predecessor took about 140 milliseconds to complete a trade. TradElect took about ten. The exchange had bought exactly the improvement it asked for.

The trouble was that the thing it was competing against stopped being the old system. Chi-X and the other venues that opened under MiFID were already quoting in single-digit milliseconds and heading for microseconds, and they were doing it on commodity Linux boxes that cost a fraction of what the exchange had just signed for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ 8 september 2008 ~

On the morning of 8 September 2008 the exchange stopped. Trading was mostly unavailable for over seven hours, on a day when the market was moving hard on the US government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a week before Lehman Brothers filed. Traders spent the day watching an outage instead of the largest financial event of their careers.

The exchange blamed a software problem and never said much more than that. London's blue chips went untraded on their home exchange for most of a session in the middle of a financial crisis, in the first year that MiFID had given everyone somewhere else to go. Inside the exchange the replacement question stopped being whether and became when.

~ the argument it started ~

In 2009 the LSE bought MillenniumIT, a Sri Lankan software firm, for eighteen million pounds. What it wanted was the matching engine, written in C++ on Linux and running under a millisecond, for less than the annual maintenance on what it already had. Buying the whole company cost less than half of what TradElect had cost to build.

Every engineer with a preference had a field day. To one side it proved that Windows could not do serious low-latency work. To the other it proved nothing, because the outage was never traced publicly to the operating system and the real story was an expensive consultant-built architecture that would have been slow on anything. I was finishing an engineering degree while this was going around, and it was one of the first times I watched a platform argument get decided by a procurement decision rather than by anybody measuring anything.

~ the switchover ~

They did it in one move. TradElect was switched off over the weekend of 12 and 13 February 2011 and Millennium Exchange went live on Monday 14 February, with no parallel running and no gradual migration. Vendors had been given fifteen months to get ready.

It did not go smoothly. The new system took the exchange down for around four hours later that month, which was its own headline. But TradElect was gone and it did not come back. Three years and eight months of service, for about forty million pounds.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »