After a relatively slow start, dark pools development in Canada picked up speed in 2011. In response to the growing dark trading activities, Canadian regulators, the CSA and IIROC, published their final dark pool regulations (“Provisions Respecting Dark Liquidity”).

As a noticeable leader in the Canadian trading market and operator of the biggest Canadian dark pool MATCH Now, ITG Canada shared its comments on the newly released rules. You can see the full commentary article on the ITG website here.

Comparing to the U.S. market, dark pools are still in its infancy in Canada. But it also indicates great potential and profitable opportunities. Last year at the Quant Invest Canada event, a panel of experts reviewed the (short) history and functionality of Canadian dark pools. This year, more senior Canadian market veterans will analyze exactly what benefits dark pools bring to investors and traders and the impact they generate on public market liquidity. Mr. Ian Domowitz, Managing Director of ITG Canada, will join this panel discussion.

In addition, ITG is a Bronze Sponsor of this year’s Quant Invest Canada conference. At this premier gathering for Canadian quantitative investors and traders, ITG will further demonstrate its market-leader status.

Newedge is a global leader in multi-asset brokerage and clearing. It announced in March the launch of Phase 2 of their Smart Order Router (SOR) platform for U.S. equity options and cash equities products. This upgrade of platform aims to provide independent, best execution and superior price discovery to all executing market participants, including small- and mid-sized registered broker dealers, market makers.

Hoping that its new cutting-edge technology can make clients more satisfied, Newedge holds on to its No.2 ranking from the CFTC for Segregated Funds. Additionally, Newedge ranks No. 2 for funds of Newedge USA clients trading both US and non-US markets.

Being an active market participant, Newedge would not miss the Trading Show Chicago 2012 event. As an exhibitor, Newedge will showcase its leading technology at the expo.

The Trading Show Chicago conference is a premier event that assembles the brightest minds in trading industry to share their latest researches and new trading ideas. There will be a lot of exciting product demos, whitepaper presentations and seminars taking place on the exhibition floor; check it out here to register and visit the expo for free!

Deutsche Bank is aggressively expanding its low latency produce and services in the U.S. to attract more speed-hungry traders.

Earlier, it rolled out its µltra FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) product suite to all major US stock exchange co-location facilities, including NYSE, NYSE Arca, NASDAQ, Direct Edge and BATS. The μltra FPGA platform provides high volume, ultra-low latency direct market access to US equity markets, with comprehensive, pre-trade compliance and risk management checks while minimizing order latency delays. Its consistent market-leading performance has been independently verified by 3rd party latency monitoring agency, Correlix RaceTeam.

To make their message heard by more traders and share new ideas about trading execution technology, Deutsche Bank just joined the Trading Show Chicago 2012 event as a Silver Sponsor. The Low Latency Equity Trading team leader, John Cogman, will participate on the “Smarter vs. faster” panel discussion on June 27.

The Trading Show Chicago 2012 is the premier gathering of the trading community. Check out the world-class speakers here and visit the expo and on-floor seminars for free!

Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is a leading global expert on utilizing numerical engineering to delivering high-quality computational software and high performance computing services. And recently, NAG has been recognized by Investors in People (IIP) as part of the top 1% of UK organisations.

IIP aims to provide a UK national quality standard which defines good practice for improving an organization’s performance through its people. NAG has been staying at the highest standard for years, and in March 2012, achieve the Gold Standard, the highest in IIP’s new evaluation system.

With NAG so committed to and thriving in investing in its employees and building the strongest team possible, its clients can enjoy world-class services from a group of the best talents in the market. IIP’s recognition of NAG’s success in developing its team certainly makes it stand out from the crowd.

NAG is a proud sponsor and active participant at the Trading Show Chicago 2012 event. Dr. Jeremy Walton will be giving a presentation in the exhibition hall at 3:30pm, June 26: Quant Rx: a cure for the common code. More interestingly, NAG’s team of experts will set up an interactive “NAG Clinic” through the conference days to prescribe solutions to any of your quantitative challenges.

Quantitative and fundamental analyses were thought to be mutually exclusive. However, now there is a new strategy gradually emerging and it’s name is “Quantamental”.

A few days ago, Morgan Stanley’s equity strategy team published their list of five most favored and five least favored growth stocks based on their "quantamental" model. Team leader Adam Parker explains that when a Morgan Stanley analyst has fundamental conviction on a stock and our quantitative models agree, the subsequent performance is superior to either discipline alone.

The reason why these two distinct analytical styles can be combined is that both quantitative and fundamental analysts basically utilize similar factors, like price to earnings multiple, past performance of the security, market cap of the security, the firm’s sector classification etc. Hence based on the fully-developed, mature fundamental analysis, quantitative models are also to further strength of discipline and optimize outcomes.

Sometimes, they can also be combined to fully explore certain markets. Some ex-wall street bankers are trying to bring quantitative models to China’s stock market. But in a market where intraday selling is not yet allowed and limitation of pricing data is severe, these ambitious quant managers might have to borrow some more fundamental analytics.

At the very least, quant manager can examine their models from different angles using fundamental analytical patterns. Mr. James Norman of QS Investors will be presenting at the Quant Invest Chicago 2012 event and discuss if a top-down, macro oriented approach produces more consistent returns than bottom-up stock selection.

Nasdaq OMX Group announced last month that it plans to open its 3rd options exchange to further complement the stock derivatives market.

Nasdaq considers this new platform a necessary addition to its floor-based Nasaq OMX PHLX and the fully electronic Nasdaq Options Market. Its two existing options exchanges were home to more than one-quarter of all U.S. options trading in March. Currently the new venue is pending regulatory approval and can be launched as soon as June.

Besides Nasdaq, NYSE Euronext and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) each operates two options trading platforms. Counting ISE, BATS Global Markets and Boston Options Exchange (BOX), there are 9 options exchanges now in the US. With ISE planning to open its second platform and Miami International Holdings launching another one, the number of options exchanges might grow to 12 within this year.

In theory, the more exchanges the merrier, because competition can improve product variety and services. However, some big brokers, such as BofA Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse, are not particularly welcoming of these new potential venues. On the one hand, it significantly increases their technology budgets since they have to connect to all the exchanges. On the other hand, enough trading volume is needed to support all the venues and there hides the danger of fragmented market and liquidity.

C-level leaders from NYSE Euronext, CBOE and Boston Options Exchange will speak at the Exchange Technology World Chicago conference. At the event, they will discuss topics ranging from exchange technology development to market consolidation/exchange mergers.

Traditionally, high frequency traders seeking the fastest connections between markets have looked to fiber-optic networks. It’s been a largely successful endeavour. Latency between the markets of Chicago and New York has been cut as low as 13.3 milliseconds. But now, microwave radio technology is the uprising new star in the low-latency arena because traders are looking into wireless connectivity to cut extra milliseconds.

The pivotal focus is still to develop route between New York (the stock trading capital) and Chicago (the currency and options trading capital). The competition is extremely fierce as is usual case in the low latency race. For example, the New York based McKay Brothers is constructing a microwave network between the Big Apple and the Windy City. Cielo Networks, on the other hand, specifically targets the HFT market and their strong demand for point to point communications technology. NJ startup Low Latency Group is aiming to raise 5 millions from up to 8 trading firms in order to build a private NY-Chicago microwave radio network, only to be shared by the contributing firms.

As of now, application of microwave technology in the HFT space is still for the speed junkies. Due to its exposure to natural environment, such networks are falling far behind the traditional optical fiber in terms of resilience and stability. But for some, speed is the utmost key to winning the HFT trading war.

At the High Frequency Trading World Chicago conference, experts from proprietary trading firms and connectivity providers will discuss all viable options for the speed-hunger traders. Also there will be exciting demos in the exhibition hall to showcase the latest breakthrough in network and connectivity technology.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd. (HKEx), together with 3 other global exchanges (CME Group, NYSE Euronext and InterContinental Exchange), are in the final bidding for the 135-year old London Metal Exchange (LME).

The growing role of Asia, especially China, might turn out to be crucial in this bidding. Earlier this month, LME indicated that it’s considering offering traders the chance to settle its contracts in the Chinese Renminbi, because now China is the dominant force in the market, accounting for more than 40 per cent of global demand for most metals and a rapidly increasing share of trading in LME futures.

With its close ties to the Mainland China, HKEx is definitely leading the integration of China and the global commodity markets. It has announced plans for a range of renminbi-denominated commodity futures, and set aside $258 million (159 million pounds) to expand into commodities and fixed income.

But HKEx needs to overcome some financial challenge to close the deal. It’s reported to seek up to $3 billion loan for LME bid. The good news is that it has won shareholders’ approval to issue more shares when the board sees fit, paving the way for its acquisition of the LME.

Come to the Exchange Technology World Chicago and the Trading Show Chicago 2012 event to hear what big and small global exchanges think about consolidation of the market. Mr. Richard Leung, SVP of HKEx, will deliver a Keynote Address on June 27.

In recent years, various constituents in the financial services industry have played their part in reducing latency, to a point now where we’re seeing diminishing returns. Nevertheless, latency is still the prominent buzz word in the highly competitive world of modern electronic trading, as it is not about the absolute speed but being faster than your competition.

In response to such an intensified latency race, CBOE recently announced their plan to migrate the primary matching engine to New Jersey, where all other major exchanges and trading firms site their engines. On the other end, companies are still working on cutting down the time for signals to travel between New York City and Chicago: network specialist Ciena has made round-trip travel time to as little as 14.5 milliseconds. There are still plenty of trading strategies that can take advantage of such a low-latency connection.

However, physical cables seem not fast enough for some latency-enthusiastic, even with optical technology; the most latency-sensitive high frequency traders are now using microwave transmission systems to get ever faster, despite its prohibitively expensive cost.

So is the latency race all that matters for high frequency traders? Experts from the most successful trading firms and exchange leaders will come to the Trading Show Chicago to debate on this utmost technology challenge.

Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) plans to move its flagship options trading platform from Chicago to Secaucus, New Jersey in the 4th quarter this year. As the largest and oldest venue for trading options, CBOE will be the last major stock or options exchange to locate in a data center in the New York metropolitan area.

This might be the latest step in CBOE’s efforts to attract high-frequency traders, who by their very nature have to be very cognizant of latency. So the 12 or 13 milliseconds it takes to route an order from New York to Chicago isn’t fast enough for these rapid-fire traders and could potentially cause them to lose millions.

The move later this year will also include CBOE’s futures exchange and its OneChicago single stock futures exchange. And by then, all major stocks and options exchanges, as well as major trading firms based in New York City or Chicago, will all site their matching/execution engines in the New York area. So there come all the co-location services to cut down latency to the bare minimum.

CBOE is one of the sponsors at the Trading Show Chicago 2012 event. One of the conference streams, Exchange Technology World Chicago will focuses on discussing technology challenges global exchanges are facing nowadays and in the near future.