FOREX TECHNOLOGY
>>>
lower, which is a very cost effective and manageable way to quickly embark on new projects with the minimum of capital spend.”
Needs of FX
Tolman argues that the capacity of the cloud to provide high-speed calculations using large volumes of data is becoming more important to FX firms, particularly in the current regulatory environment. “Central banks and regulators will want answers very quickly. If you are a sterling-based bank, for example, issuing a credit default swap in dollars and an event triggers the stress testing of a portfolio against not just the credit risk but the foreign exchange risk, cloud lends itself to this type of calculation,” says Tolman.
Harpal Sandhu, CEO at Integral in Silicon Valley, a technology provider that offers the entire life cycle of FX as a service through FX Cloud, an open FX platform, says the fragmented nature of FX markets – characterised by competing hubs vying for liquidity – also particularly lends itself to Cloud-based solutions. Integral tailors its trading and aggregation solutions to match the profile of its customers which include buy side banks, brokers, prime brokers, hedge funds and sell side banks.
Integral has a data center in London, server space within Equinix’s Secaucus NY4 in New Jersey along with back-up data centers in different locations across the globe. Clients can connect to more than 200 financial institutions, along with major Forex trading hubs such as Bloomberg, Currenex, Electronic Broking Services (EBS) and Reuters.
“Forex markets are opaque and heterogeneous. We allow customers to customise how they trade, who they see and who they are visible to. We take what you have and you trade on one screen,” says Sandhu.
George Popescu, CEO of Boston Technologies, a provider of software solutions and trading platforms to institutional and retail brokerage firms in the FX market, points to the unsteady nature of the Forex markets, which he says makes the scalability which the cloud offers very important. “Tere are times when people have to trade a lot and others when things are quiet. So because of this, one has to scale the resources on a whim but also because the market is very competitive. It also means scaling for new customers,” says Popescu.
Lowered entry barriers Sandhu points out that cloud computing technology
100 | october 2011 e-FOREX
Robin Manicom
“Te cloud turns this traditional model on its head – switching a Capex spend into Opex over most likely a two, three or five-year contract.”
has lowered barriers to entry in the Forex market. While Integral’s clients now include many major banks, initially its customer base consisted of many second- tier or regional banks in the US, without the resources to build their own Forex trading infrastructure. “We remove potential conflicts of interest that can arise if a second-tier bank enlists the FX services of a prime broker who will of course be able to see all their trading positions,” explains Sandhu. “Our customers have much more flexibility. Tey can switch prime brokers and liquidity providers at will.”
Sam Johnston, director of cloud and IT services at Equinix, believes that cloud-based services will initially be used for the offline components of Forex trading. Tis will include the development and back-testing of algorithms with historic market data, along with risk calculations which can require large amounts of server space. Tese include Monte Carlo simulations – which are deployed to reduce uncertainty in anticipating future events – a tool widely used in risk management, portfolio management and the pricing of derivatives. “Te big computing farms designed specifically for these purposes are typically under-utilised ” says Johnston.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196