TMX Atrium Focuses on FX - Connects FastMatch To Connectivity Community

Canadian venue-neutral infrastructure provider TMX Atrium has made a considerable number of steps in increasing its footprint recently, with a series of international venues having joined its community.

Today, TMX Atrium announced that FastMatch has joined the TMX Atrium community, further demonstrating the company's increasing focus on the FX industry.

FastMatch, a matching system of spot foreign exchange trading, which is an FX ECN, primarily owned by Credit Suisse and FXCM, whose activities this summer have included adding liquidity to MetaTrader 5, joined TMX Atrium to take advantage of the firm’s extensive North American, European and Russian coverage.

Connectivity is provided from the TMX Atrium co-located facility at Equinix London 4 (LD4), as well as Equinix Secaucus (NY4), and allows FastMatch to benefit from instant access to the firm’s growing FX community.

TMX Atrium’s venue-neutral platform currently encompasses a network of 30 points of presence across multiple FX Liquidity centers, and offers a choice of access to multi-asset class venues. The company performed upgrades to its points of presence infrastructure in North America recently, as well as implementing it in Europe, to provide increased availability between Paris and London one day later.

Emmanuel Carjat, Managing Director of TMX Atrium, made a corporate statement to the effect that, “As demand for FX capabilities continues to increase across our community, our members can be assured that TMX Atrium provides the capability they require, now and in the future, as FX volumes continue to grow and trading strategies become more complex. Through on-going infrastructure enhancements, our network is perfectly positioned to scale with the growing demands of FX trading.”

Concentrating Efforts on FX

Today, TMX Atrium's Managing Director spoke to Forex Magnates regarding the firm's concentration on providing connectivity to FX venues.

"We are seeing the FX space moving towards lower latency and higher message frequency rates," stated Mr. Carjat.

"This is probably what is driving our success in this space. We have been providing low latency connectivity via London's Equinix data centers for the equitites and stocks business for some time and the clusterting of liquidity in LD4 is good for us."

Mr. Carjat detailed that the institutional FX sector is of significant interest to TMX Atrium because "equities have become more regulated, therefore some of our clients are becoming interested in other asset classes. This is partly what is driving our expansion into FX."

"Firms that have been involved in equities trading have come to us and asked that we connect them to FX venues," he said.

The company considers FX trading in Moscow is very significant. "The entire ruble, dollar, and euro pairs are common in terms of what our customers ask for," explained Mr. Carjat. "What is key to those particular clients is the low latency trading into London and into Frankfurt."

During the course of the year, some firms have moved into microwave technology in order to connect traders to venues. This has negated the need for expensive cabling and could also be viewed as a method of connecting many venues quickly. Mr. Carjat sees the value in this, but also understands that microwave technology has a limit in terms of transmission speed compared to light-based fiber optics. "We are looking at microwave connectivity, but the challenge which all firms face with using such a method is adverse weather conditions. Storms and bad weather can cause latency, and affect trading," explained Mr. Carjat.

"That said, on one hand, it is cost effective because there is no need to excavate and install cabling across long distances, but the available bandwith is alot less. A typical instalation will give 600 megabits per second for one antenna which often is not enough to satisfy clients."

Mr. Carjat elaborated further that," If a firm invests in digging fiber optics, they will be able to achieve hundreds of megabytes per second. Therefore my synopsis is that it is cheaper to build microwave infrastructure but it is more expensive on a pure megabit level overall. Microwave technology is a very interesting dynamic. In North America, between New York and Chicago it is of interest, and in Europe between London and Frankfurt, but the latency issue is omnipresent."

Dmitri Galinov, Chief Executive Officer of FastMatch, added that, “TMX Atrium can quickly respond to, and support our rapid growth within the FX community. Key to our decision to join TMX Atrium was the range of services they offer within Equinix LD4, and their significant and growing presence across Europe and Russia. We believe this service, plus access combination, will help us successfully continue to build out our FX community within these regions.”