Progress Apama Keen to Win China's Interest in Algo Trading

Chinese financial markets are taking on the challenge to compete with the western 'big brothers' of New York and London as leading equity brokers have been eyeing the opportunities in algorithmic trading. Progress Apama, a global software company has signed up leading investment bank China Merchants Securities to deploy the Progress(R) Apama(R) Capital Markets platform to bring low latency, algorithmic trading to its Chinese retail customers. Progress Apama entered the Chinese algo market when it offered its services to Citic Securities. China Merchants Securities plans to extend its offering to institutional Buy-Side clients in the future.

In China's rapidly-developing securities markets, interest in algorithmic trading is growing strongly. With the deployment of the Progress Apama platform, China Merchants Securities has responded to interest from its high net worth retail customers in algorithmic trading by providing them with both ready-made and client-specific algorithmic strategies.

The Apama Capital Markets platform went into production at China Merchants Securities in Shenzhen in June 2012. Currently, the company provides eight common strategies for equities and equity derivatives including volume-weighted average price (VWAP), and also provides tailor-made strategies to customers. In the future, China Merchants Securities plans to expand the platform to other asset classes including financial index futures and commodities futures.

GuangYan Wu, General Manager of Individual Investor Dept. from China Merchants Securities said: "Algorithmic trading in China has been growing but few brokerage firms can offer clients a customizable, scalable and robust algorithmic Trading Platform with ultra-low latency. To provide these value-added services to our customers and grow our retail business, we decided to build our algorithmic trading platform on top of the Progress Apama Platform. Our first goal is to expand our presence in retail markets followed by our institutional buy-side clients."

Richard Bentley, vice president of capital markets at Progress Software, said: "China Merchants Securities chose Apama over more than 10 competitors because Progress demonstrated to its IT team that it had the most customizable and scalable algorithmic platform offering. Our team worked closely with China Merchants Securities to ensure the bank could build highly-targeted trading strategies specific to the Chinese market."

In 2012, Guangfa Securities (GF Securities), a Chinese equity broker, signed up with StreamBase to develop an algorithmic trading platform.