Press releases 2007

18 June 2007

London Stock Exchange's new trading system goes live

TradElect, the London Stock Exchange’s new electronic trading system, has today gone live in London. With the launch of this entirely new technology platform, market participants will benefit from significant increases in both speed of trading and system capacity.

David Lester, the Exchange’s Chief Information Officer, said:

“The introduction of TradElect, the culmination of a four year investment in next generation technology, will deliver a step change in trading capabilities to the London market. As high-frequency algorithmic traders look globally for pools of liquidity in which to find alpha opportunities, TradElect sets new benchmarks in terms of system capacity and performance.

“TradElect reflects the Exchange’s strategic decision to replace its technology rather than take tactical steps to adapt the existing, outdated technology that most other market centres are using. Its launch underlines the Exchange’s commitment to invest continuously to improve market efficiency for the benefit of all traders, investors and listed companies. Together with a long-standing reputation for full transparency of information, strong regulation and progressive fee reductions, the London markets are underscoring their leading global position.”

TradElect gives the market the ability to execute trades fully and resiliently in around 10 milliseconds. This builds on the performance of Infolect, launched in October 2005, which provides the market with a full depth view of company prices within 2 milliseconds. These levels of performance should drive further increases in trading volume and allow new market strategies to be applied in London.

TradElect also increases the Exchange’s capacity, initially fivefold, to enable significant trading growth. In fact, TradElect’s launch capacity would be sufficient to handle the current trading transactions for all European equities. Moreover, TradElect enables the Exchange to further double capacity on demand, and at less than one fifth of previous costs.

The new platform has been designed to the highest levels of resilience with comprehensive back up, which includes dual processing at two sites and recovery from component failure within a second.

In preparation for today’s launch, customers have had access to test environments for the last nine months and there were three market weekend dress rehearsals over the past two months to prepare market systems for cutover. All market participants that deal directly have self-certified their readiness for today’s launch.

For further information, please contact:

London Stock Exchange
Patrick Humphris Press Office +44 (0)20 7797 1222
newsroom@londonstockexchange.com