Getting Connected Staying Connected

Over the past few years, CME Group has made a significant investment in technology – but it is the people on the company’s Globex Account Management team who also made that investment worthwhile. 

If connecting to a trading platform was only as easy as connecting to the Internet. As electronic trading platforms have grown in sophistication and complexity, connecting to them has become a bit more challenging. At CME Group, the Globex Account Management (GAM) team works directly with customers, improving their ability to connect to the CME Globex electronic trading platform and develop new, compatible trading functionality.

GAM assigns an account manager to each firm, based on the customer’s clearing firm relationship and geographic location. The relationship is an ongoing one, with GAM account managers providing customer education and keeping them up-to-date on the latest CME Globex functionality. Within CME Group, GAM account managers serve as customer advocates for electronic trading. This in-depth understanding of customers leads to the development of new services, such as CME Group’s collocation service, LNet, which was launched in 2006.

While no two customers are alike, CME Group Magazine recently spoke with two customers, one in Chicago and a second one in London, about their experiences getting connected.

 

SPEED AND APPLICATION IMPROVEMENTS

Infinium Capital Management has grown from a tiny group of developers and proprietary traders to a major U.S. market maker with CME Group. Over that time, GAM’s account managers helped Infinium take advantage of CME Globex match engine’s increased speed – 9.5 millisecond average response times today versus 1.5 seconds five years ago – as well as improving messaging structures and applications,
according to Infinium Chief Information Officer Brian Johnson.

“CME Group has really evolved with us as they have taken more of a partnering approach with their clients,” Johnson says. “This became
evident a few years ago, when we provided solicited feedback that helped CME Group develop a more expansive, battle-tested options trading system. Since then, GAM has proactively kept us informed of developments so we can take advantage of new features and systems as soon as CME rolls them out. For example, we were able to more quickly refine our market maker set-up for options so that we could handle ‘mass quote’ options.” Authorized CME Globex market makers can use mass quoting to submit bid/ask pairs and generate two-sided markets for multiple instruments for CME Group options.

 

NEW FEATURES TO IMPROVE TRANSPARENCY

As another example, a large London-based proprietary trading firm worked with CME Group’s U.K.-based GAM team on its algorithmic trading. Says a company executive, “They helped us troubleshoot issues and generally expedite our connection to the market. We also found that CME Globex technology staff was open to suggestions of new features that would help improve the transparency of the order book updates. Algorithmic traders require order book transparency, volume, low latency market access and low transaction costs. By addressing latency with technology investment, the exchange helps to make it a more attractive venue for high volume practitioners such as us.”

 

 

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