Online Stockmarket Trading Update

Interesting times are ahead of us with the Federal Government encouraging new entrants to break the monopoly that the ASX has in the Australian Equity Markets and allow further rival Stock Markets into Australia.

The ASX can see the writing on the wall with their own announcement on the upcoming upgrade to their technology.

Historically, the ASX used a technology called SEATS that our systems would connect to for market data. A number of years ago, they switched across to ITS. With the above announcement, they’re now moving a third time to something called Genium INET. We’ll be looking at this new technology in the coming months to review what changes we need to make internally, but the structure of our Market Data System should mean that the change is minimal.

What’s more exciting is that if the competitive markets are introduced, then our Market Data System should again easily support both quote data from those markets and also execution to them giving more options to our members.

Rapid Trader, the first of our products to use our new Market Data System, has been out in the wild now for a month. The uptake of users on this system is encouraging to see. We’re now hard at work on adding some additional features to the product, whilst continuing our work on our existing products being moved across to the new system.

We’re also interested in publishing the programming interface for our Market Data System for clients to use with their own software and programming. If this is something that you might be interested, then please e-mail me with the address craig.foley@mdsfinancial.com.au.

Craig Foley
Chief Information Officer