NYSE Euronext Ups the Stakes on US Cash Equity Markets Monitoring

NYSE Euronext today said it went live with ITRS Geneos for monitoring a portion of its U.S. cash equities trading infrastructure, a move that will help the exchange operator detect potential problems within its own venues.

Currently, the Geneos platform is only being used in the U.S. cash markets, according to Bruce Lee, CIO of NYSE Euronext who responded to questions via email. “We are covering all of our customer connections as well as the operation of the core trading engines, which are two of our most critical and complex market components,” explained Lee in the email.

The key theme is correlation — being warned of an event beginning in one part of the connected infrastructure before it cascades to another part.

“The Geneos solution is giving us a faster and more complete correlation of events across those components than our previous tools provided – which gives our team more bandwidth to focus on core business needs and value adds," said NYSE Euronext's CIO in the email.

After completion of the phased implementation NYSE Euronext will be using ITRS Geneos to monitor its entire U.S. equities and options exchange technology environment, from matching engines and client gateway connectivity to market data delivery, using a single tool.

The complexity and interconnectedness of the US equity market structure has made it necessary for trading venues to deploy monitoring technologies that give them transparency into the various components of their infrastructure.

According to Kevin Covington, CEO of London-based ITRS, NYSE Euronext completed a Proof of Concept (POC) and was able to get the system running very quickly.

“The main thing is they were trying to achieve is to get instrumentation at a holistic level across their both internal and some of their external faces interfaces,” said Covington. ITRS has been working with NYSE Euronext for about four to five months, he said.

A series of technical malfunctions at several exchanges this year has pointed to the complexity of the interconnected markets. “Market venues have become very interconnected,” said Covington. “When there are performance and availability questions, it very beneficial for the venues to determine whether its in their internal tech stack, or whether it’ external to them,” said Covington.

“What they’re building is a picture of availability, performance and capacity perspective of their own interconnected systems,” said Covington.

“They’re also able to look at the edges of their environment, as they see services come in from third -party interfaces to them,” he continued.For example, if one of the other venues has a started an issue with the market data supply to the exchange, they can see to the edge of them, they can see it’s a third party,” said Covington.

With ITRS Geneos ,NYSE Euronext is able to replace a collection of tools with a single integrated dashboard, making problem diagnosis and corrective action much more efficient and quickly implemented.” In the email, Lee said NYSE Euronext had a good solution it used previously, and its experienced staff was able to manage it very effectively. “However, the new dashboards are simpler and easier to use which is always a plus when dealing with complex, high-performance technology,” stated Lee.

Among the top 3 factors that NYSE Euronext liked about ITRS Geneos were its heritage in real time financial systems monitoring, “We could count on it being reliably adapted to our environment,” wrote Lee in the email. Second, the ease of setting up rules that look for the difference between what is normal behavior and what is abnormal, including the ability to effectively screen out false positives. Third, it has the ability to graphically display the state of the systems and the user interface overall, said Lee.

But will ITRS Geneos enable NYSE Euronext to identify a problem in a venue originating in a venue that is connected to its markets?

“When we understand and have modeled normal market behavior, the system will alert us to occurrences outside those parameters once they enter our environment. This will not be an absolute indication that there is problem,” cautioned Lee. “It’s more of an alert that something has changed, which we can then quickly investigate and diagnose. It’s about becoming even more proactive and ITRS helps us improve that ability,” stated Lee.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio