Multi Exchange Trading System

METS is a order routing and information management system which has the ability to handle multiple securities traded on multiple stock exchanges. Developed as a project to display trades on six GCC stock exchanges in the Middle East, the primary objective was to allow investors to place trades on any of the stock exchanges via their local brokers by using an interface built for the investors.

The local brokers in turn would be able to communicate with the brokers of other stock exchanges via the system in order to execute these trades on behalf of their clients. METS acts as a routing system to facilitate these trades.

Features

The goals of the system are:

• Display price feed from multiple stock exchanges.

• Realtime routing of incoming and outgoing information.

• Fat Client (Java front-end using push technology) for brokers and a few high value investors. The fat client has the order routing and order tracking facilities. The investor gets limited facilities of the fat client.

• Thin Client (browser based front end using pull technology) for investors who would place orders via the Internet.

• Graphical Indicators - technical analysis tools like RSI, ROC, EMA, MACD, and other financial indicators.

• Content management system wherein the client gets to upload contents into the system which would be later displayed through the thin client.

• The billing module keeps track of all the activities of investors and brokers. Investors and brokers can see their billing statements online.

• Reports giving key information on the companies traded on all the exchanges in the METS system are available.

• Unicode has been used in the system which facilitates use of different languages (presently English and Arabic is used by the user).

• System monitor which enables the user to check the load on each component using the system.

Benefits

• Centralized management of orders and trades.

• Efficient and instantaneous communication between the trading entities

• Realtime updation of prices from the exchanges

• Transparency in trading

Technical Architecture

The METS system is based on a 3-tier architecture namely, the Front-end, the Business Logic and the RDBMS. The front-end includes a Fat Client and a Thin Client. The Fat Client is developed using Java Swing. The Thin Client is developed using JSP. The business logic is contained in Java Classes in the case of Fat Clients and in JSP Beans in the case of Thin Clients. All the data is stored in the database.

The stock feed collects the feed (which is in XML format) from different stock exchanges. The XML parser converts the data into the format required by the system and is stored in the database.

From the storyboard to implementation, METS took a total of 24 man months. The project commenced in the first week of June 2000 and was finally commissioned on October 2000.