The Philippines Preps for High-Frequency Trading

The Philippines Stock Exchange (PSE) is one of the oldest stock exchanges in Asia, having been in operation since the establishment of the Manila Stock Exchange in 1927. It maintains two trading floors, one at the PSE Center in Pasig City, and one at its principal office in the Makati City Central Business District. With its existing front-end trading system due to expire, the PSE engaged in a replacement project which led to the implementation of a new front-end solution provided by Flextrade System.

The decision for a new trading system was driven by the PSE’s need for higher capacity and better trading performance in order to start algorithmic, or high volume, high frequency trading. As a result, the stock exchange needed to refresh its infrastructure, including its storage, to ensure it could support the demands of high frequency trading. With data protection critical to the functioning of the PSE, a planned upgrade of its existing disaster recovery site, located several kilometers from the main exchange in Metro Manila, has been completed.

“We are confident Dell EMC VMAX All Flash storage will meet the performance demands of high frequency trading as we move to this new era in trading activity in the Philippines.”

— Philip Driz, Head of Technology, the Philippines Stock Exchange

Meeting the demands of peak trading volumes mean ensuring technology can meet the throughput required for up to 20,000 messages per second hitting the database during trading hours. The PSE wanted an all-flash storage array with massive read and write capabilities, and one that could scale easily to store three years of trading data.

The PSE has gained a high performance, and highly available all-flash technology storage platform that can meet the demands of high frequency trading. With Dell EMC VMAX rapid response times and high scalability, the stock exchange can handle significantly larger trading volumes and process trades enabled by the new front-end trading system. The Dell EMC all flash storage provides the flexibility for PSE to offer algorithmic trading and other new services, leading to increases in market liquidity and in participation.

Environment Enables High-Frequency Trading

The PSE deployed Dell EMC VMAX 250F at two sites with Dell EMC Symmetrix® Remote Data Facility (SRDF) delivering data replication between production and disaster recovery. Dell EMC VMAX 250F all-flash arrays can scale up to 1 petabyte of effective usable capacity in a single half rack, allowing room for growth at low cost. VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing the stock exchange’s VMware vSphere environments.

With its move to a new front-end trading system, the PSE needed storage infrastructure that could handle the high trading volumes resulting from a move to algorithmic trading and enable continued innovation of new trading initiatives. With high capacity, high performance storage, the PSE can gain the benefits that high frequency trading brings.

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