Electronic Trading Platform

An electronic trading platform being used at the Deutsche Börse.

In finance, an electronic trading platform is a computer system that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. This includes products such as shares, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives with a financial intermediary, such as a brokers, market makers, Investment banks or stock exchanges. Such platforms allow electronic trading to be carried out by users from any location and are in contrast to traditional floor trading using open outcry and telephone based trading.

Electronic trading platforms typically stream live market prices on which users can trade and may provide additional trading tools, such as charting packages, news feeds and account management functions. Some platforms have been specifically designed to allow individuals to gain access to financial markets that could traditionally only be accessed by specialist trading firms such as allowing margin trading on forex and derivatives such as contract for difference. They may also be designed to automatically trade specific strategies based on technical analysis or to do high-frequency trading.

[edit] Etymology

The term ‘trading platform’ is generally used to avoid confusion with ‘trading system’ which is more often associated with the trading method or strategy rather than the computer system used to execute orders within financial circles.^[1]

[edit] Historic development

The first electronic trading platforms were typically associated with stock exchanges and allowed brokers to place orders remotely using private dedicated networks and dumb terminals. Early systems would not always provide live streaming prices and instead allowed brokers or clients to place an order which would be confirmed some time later; these were known as ‘request for quote‘ based systems.

Trading systems evolved to allow for live streaming prices and near instant execution of orders as well as using the internet as the underlying network meaning that location became much less relevant. Some electronic trading platforms have built in scripting tools and even APIs allowing traders to develop automatic or algorithmic trading systems and robots.

The client graphical user interface of the electronic trading platforms can be used to trade currencies, equities, futures, or options and are also sometimes called trading turrets (this may be true, but is probably a misuse of the term, as trading turret refers to the specialized phone appliance used by traders).

[edit] Trading platform standards

The National Futures Association (NFA) in the US lists the following general standard requirements for forex electronic trading systems;^[2]

Authentication (Passwords, Authentication Tokens such as secureID cards; or digital certificates)
Encryption
Transactions recording standard
Pricing and slippage standard