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Millennium Exchange

Millennium Exchange
Developer(s)
Operating system Linux
Platform Commodity hardware
Type Electronic trading platform

Millennium Exchange is the electronic trading platform currently used and developed by the . It has also been sold and is in use by a number of other exchanges around the world.

In 2009, the London Stock Exchange Group was unhappy with the cost and the insufficient speed of their electronic trading platform, TradElect, so after only 2 years of operating TradElect they decided to switch to a new platform. The LSE investigated the possibility of building a new system in-house, but eventually decided on acquiring the existing, Linux-based system, Millennium Exchange, which had a lower, sub-millisecond latency.

It acquired this system by acquiring the company that created it, Sri Lanka-based MillenniumIT, in 2009, for £18m. In its annual report, the LSE said that it expected the switch to Millennium Exchange to save $16m per year starting from the 2012 financial year.

In October 2010, the London Stock Exchange claimed that Millennium Exchange had broken the world record for trade speed, with 126 microsecond trading times being recorded on the Turquoise dark pool trading venue, and said that it would go live on 1 November.

The system was taken out of service following a 2-hour outage of the Turquoise venue on 2 November 2010. The incident was, according to LSE officials, caused by human error that "may have occurred in suspicious circumstances." Plans were to introduce Millennium Exchange on the main share trading platform as well, in December. The LSE stated it was hoping the software would be ready for use again early in 2011.

In February 2011, the London Stock Exchange finished the switch to Linux. LSE chief executive Xavier Rolet said that the exchange, once a monopoly, would deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals.

As well as the the system has been sold to a number of other exchanges including Borsa Italiana, , and the Bolsa de Valores de Lima.


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