10 March 2009 News

 

Progress Apama and FFastFill launch hosted futures spread trading application

Progress Software has launched the Progress Apama Spreader with FFastFill to help capital markets spread traders to quickly and easily automate their spread trading strategies.

Dr John Bates, founder and general manager, Apama division of Progress Software said: "In this climate firms need to show profit, ideally without increasing their costs. Firms are looking to extend their range of products to drive revenue, however the people and skills needed can be out of the reach of smaller firms. By providing our Complex Event Processing software as a service with Ffastfill, it reduces the burden on firms without any loss of performance. The full system is provided so you can extend and customise the technology while keeping it as a service."

The Progress Apama Spreader is based on Apama's multi-asset class CEP platform and is hosted by FFastFill in close proximity to major futures exchange gateways. The Progress Apama Spreader offers traders algorithmic execution of spread trades with individual leg, strategy, and fills status, as well as quick overviews of pre-configured spreads, a full choice of trading instruments, spread-specific P&L, and legging risk mitigation via lean percentage.

Patrick Thornton-Smith, managing director, FFastFill, commented: "In the futures market the latency race is in the order of milliseconds. Data traffic continues to grow and the technology underpinning trading algorithms has to cope. With the Progress Apama Spreader, trading organisations can build multi-leg, multi-instrument, multi-exchange models with links to external modelling tools, charting packages and news feeds, on a state of the art system able to handle the ever-increasing amounts of data traffic from futures exchanges.  It will allow traders to gain competitive advantage and incorporate best-of-breed components when encountering new areas."

Dr Bates added: "There is a growing awareness among futures trading firms that they need to incorporate more technology into their trading operations, however most are falling behind the data deluge. By coupling the Apama platform with FFastFill's infrastructure and services, we are offering a fast, resilient, hosted system for multi-asset class, cross exchange spread trading capable of handling growing data from futures exchanges. Furthermore, as firms leverage existing services for low latency algorithmic spread trading, they can quickly automate their spread trading operations with a minimal up-front investment."

Progress Apama is deployed by international firms like JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, ING and Bank of China, as well as regulators like the UK Financial Services Authority and trading platforms like Turquoise.