BSE now eyes 200 nano second trading speed in 3 yrs

After clocking a record trading speed of six micro seconds, leading stock exchange BSE is aiming for a much faster speed of 200 nano seconds for the trades executed on its platform, in the next three years.

Earlier this month, BSE had said it has became the world's fastest stock exchange clocking a median trade speed of six micro seconds.

"We are now having a target of going for 200 nano seconds to be achieved in next three years," BSE CIO Kersi Tavadia told PTI.

"We give time stamp (for trade execution) in nano seconds today in hope to achieve our next target," Tavadia added.
 

Tavadia said BSE has been working and experimenting on many advanced technologies including FPGA (field-programmable gate array) which would help increase the speed of trades.

According to Tavadia, to log in a speed of six micro seconds as well as better results in future, BSE had to come out of its old data centre and old network.

"Our network took 3 years to change completely without any user facing any hardship," Tavadia said.

BSE's new data centre went live on September 25 this year.

The exchange is presently in the process of shifting the servers to new data centre over next few weeks.

"Once the data centre is fully operational, we will have additional confidence to achieve even higher goals.

HP has helped set up the new state-of-the-art data centre in a record time of 90 days," Tavadia said.

While BSE's system is currently receiving 50,000 orders per second with ability to handle 5 lakh orders per second, Tavadia said the same would increase manifold without losing on response time "within a few months and at a very low cost".

BSE has made changes at every level, including hardware, software applications and database to look at reliability with respect to high speeds.

It has also designed new processes to maintain integrity of the systems.

The stock exchange had upgraded its technology platform in November, 2013 to BOLT Plus, which is based on the Deutsche Borse's T7 trading architecture and is currently the fastest trading platform in the country.

Initially, the trading system was providing 200 micro seconds response time.

More than 900 brokers with over 1,00,000 branches and millions of retail investors are on the BOLT PLUS system.