The Boston Options Exchange (BOX) has implemented a new electronic trading platform, called Sola, which was developed by the Montréal Exchange (MX).
BOX - an all-electronic exchange established in February 2002 by the Boston Stock Exchange, Bourse de Montréal and Interactive Brokers Group - says the Sola platform was selected after an assessment of competing trading platforms and will be implemented as part of a major systems overhaul at the exchange.
Will Easley, senior managing director of BOX, says: "We needed a technological overhaul because of our rapid growth, combined with what we expect to be dramatic changes in the US options industry in the next few years."
MX says its e-platform shifts the emphasis away from massive hardware investments towards "creative and intelligent software design".
The system is able to handle 100,000 orders per second per processing unit, 200,000 price updates per second per processing unit and delivers an average response time of less than 20 milliseconds. The application is also able to run on multiple platforms, including Unix, Linux and Windows.
Philippe Loumeau, senior executive vice president and COO, MX, says the Sola trading system was implemented at the Montréal Exchange in October 2005 and has significantly reduced the total cost of operations.
"It is a leading edge technological solution that easily out-performs legacy solutions. It will help financial exchanges remain competitive and position them in the technological forefront of trading systems," says Loumeau.