Technology demonstration: Automatic trading with Orc Liquidator reaches new performance levels

Orc Software has been testing the algorithmic trading application, Orc Liquidator 5.1, running on the award-winning Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) as well as Sun’s x64 AMD Opteron (TM) server – and has, for the first time, broken through the millisecond barrier.

“Our tests show a response time of less than 1 millisecond”, says Jonas Hansbo, Head of Algorithmic Trading, Orc Software. “Speed is of utmost importance when it comes to running the strategies, getting orders to market and reacting to market events.” Orc Liquidator is a flexible, high-performance server-based trading platform that allows the user to automatically trade and make markets on over 100 electronic market places supported by the Orc System. It provides the ability to quickly design new trading strategies in order to capture short-lived market opportunities – across both products and markets. This capability drastically shortens the time from trading idea to full scale execution and avoids the common limitation of only providing a fixed set of strategies. “Flexibility combined with speed and reliability are the most important factors for us in an automated trading system. Orc Liquidator excels in all of these”, says Magnus Henriksson, Chief Technology Officer, Hun Research. “We know that Orc Software is continuously investing in R&D and we are happy to learn about the excellent performance results from Orc’s tests with Sun’s latest technology.” "We are impressed with the breadth of Orc's functional coverage of trading and response to the markets with new patterns of liquidity and best execution”, says Donna Rubin, Director of Financial Services, Sun Microsystems. “Together we are poised to deliver extreme performance to the front office – and enable competitive edge." The test was conducted with Orc Liquidator 5.1 running on the Solaris 10 OS as well as Sun's x64 Sun Fire V40z server powered with the AMD (TM) processor. The measured response time included the following steps: 1. Receive a market update 2. Process and trigger on it 3. Run a trading strategy 4. Generate an order and send it to the market place For more information: Jonas Hansbo, Head of Algorithmic Trading, tel +46 8 407 38 22