The London Stock Exchange has migrated its UK cash markets to a new Linux-based trading platform.
The move was postponed in November 2010 after the Turquoise subsidiary market, which already uses the Millenium Exchange platform, suffered a two-hour outage. At the time, the LSE attributed the outage to “human error [that] may have occurred in suspicious circumstances”.
The new platform was built by Sri Lankan developer MilleniumIT, which the LSE bought in 2009. It is described as a “highly scalable, multi-asset class trading platform, offering … clients superior technical performance, ultra low-latency and enhanced functionality.”
Many financial trading systems are already based on open source software (OSS), but the LSE migration is a high profile demonstration of the viability of OSS in some of the world’s most demanding computing environments.
The integrity of securities exchange systems has come under fresh scrutiny of late. Last month, the EU’s carbon trading exchange was discontinued after it emerged that hackers had stolen carbon credits worth €7 million, while the Times reported the LSE and an unnamed US exchange had fallen victim to cyber attack in the past year.
