Marketcetera : Open Source Trading Platform

Most stock trading systems these days are mostly on Solaris, but the trend is changing. Stock broking companies are wanting effective low cost solution. Most companies I know of are moving towards .Net platform or Linux platform. .NET is far cheaper than Solaris solution, but it takes you down over the years with M$ extrating money out of you year after year! So financial companies are also looking at open solutions like Linux.

Adding to this trend, Lets welcome Marketcetera(http://www.marketcetera.org) – Open Source software for automated trading systems. Marketcetera’s platform lets brokers and traders build effective automated trading systems, develop proprietary algorithms, create order management solutions and manage risk faster, easier and at much lower cost than with closed platforms.

Here’s a Quick Overview of the system

Some special features of Marketcetera

• Process orders through FIX protocol in the exchange. This is good for DMA(Direct Market Access) Clients.
• Order Routing – You can route your orders. Its an interesting feature which I might discuss it over in another post.
• Exchange Simulators to test your stuff. You definitely need them, But not quite sure how many exchanges can they simulate? Exchanges in Asia-Pacific markets are like way too different.
• Order statuses: They kind of flow the orders from Front office to back office, Again this is quite interesting, I will try to blog on it some other day, But yes, those who are familiar with stock broking side will know what Trade Flow is all about.
• MySQL/Postgres or Oracle can be used as a back-end database. Really cool!
• It uses the Spring framework with ActiveMQ as the messaging queue – I guess JMS has become heart and soul for all stock brokers these days with Tibco and Webmethods pushing their sales guys hard on this domain. Again a good way to test out the scalability of ActiveMQ with respect to other platforms in the closed source group.
• It uses various GUI’s – For entering orders it uses Photon, for others,it also uses RoR – Not quite sure if RoR will scale up?! Big question, We’ll see.. I really wonder how much of Web 2.0 are they using!
• This is not it, there are plenty of features , particularly to hardcore stock broking side like algorithms etc, which I feel you may get an insight at their own site.

I haven’t got enough time to actually put my hands on and try it out , but it seems promising. A few more years of hardcore development and it could be the best! Just needs some experts on the business side which I think their team already has.

But the question is, Will Marketcetera be able to survive when the markets are falling. Offcourse they need a huge investment, I don’t quite know who’s funding them. The one great thing that I like about them is that they are following everything that an open source product needs: Wiki, Mailing list, releases etc. Its really good to see Trading platforms in Open Source. Hat’s off to Marketcetera Inc.