To help financial firms that are struggling to balance processing high data volumes while managing latency and high volatility in the options markets, Activ Financial and Hanweck Associates announced that they have upgraded their joint VoleraFeed product, which integrates Hanweck's options analytics solution with Activ Financial's market data feed. Hanweck's Volera analytics engine is now using the new generation of Nvidia's Tesla GPU S1070 hardware, which is twice as fast as the previous generation.

Ballista Securities, operator of the new Ballista alternative trading system that anonymously matches large electronic orders of equities and options, is using the combined VoleraFeed system to run complex analytics on U.S. options, including 300,000 plus options on more than 3,500 underlying stocks, indices and exchange-traded funds — in fewer than 10 milliseconds. Ballista ATS uses VoleraFeed to calculate complex analytics for implied volatilities and greeks, enabling volatility traders to efficiently trade options blocks through the system.

"Using VoleraFEED allows us to focus our energies on innovation, rather than the labor intensive tasks associated with market data management," said Dr. Daniel Marques, chief technology officer at Ballista Securities. "Not only do we get the information we need to facilitate efficient institutional options trading using VoleraFeed, but the latest version of the solution has provided us with significant cost reductions and performance enhancements to help keep us on the cutting edge."

Compared with standard CPU-based systems, the joint VoleraFeed product now offers the ability to price options at a rate of 14 million options per second compared to 450,000 options per second, and calculate two million implied volatilities per second compared to 65,000 per second on standard platforms, the two companies say. With the latest version of the solution, financial firms have experienced up to a 10-fold performance increase in complex mathematical calculations and up to 90 percent operational cost reductions, they assert.

Activ offers hardware-accelerated solutions for financial applications, employing field-programmable gate array technology in its market data processing unit system, while Hanweck applies graphical processing units to quantitative financial computations.