Marex Spectron creates pioneering LME trading platform

27 October 2014

London (Commodities Now): Marex Spectron, the leading global commodities broker, has created an electronic trading platform for clients who need to execute latency-sensitive strategies on the London Metals Exchange (LME) while remaining fully compliant and without sacrificing prudent risk management.

The platform works for clients using co-located data centres and contains fundamental risk checks that add just a few microseconds to trading execution times.

Simon van den Born, Global Head of Metals at Marex Spectron, said: “It has been difficult for LME members to maintain appropriate compliance and risk controls for clients who wish to deploy latency sensitive strategies on the exchange. These are the sort of issues you would expect to encounter when a market goes through the extraordinary changes the LME has in recent years but solutions have been slow to emerge.

“Our new platform solves many of those problems, enabling clients to deploy innovative strategies rapidly whilst assisting compliance functions with relevant regulations.

“We are in a unique position to help clients manage the opportunities created by the growth and evolution of the LME. We are responsible for 25% of all Ring transactions and 35% of electronic ‘Select’ volumes. I would suggest that no one knows this market better than we do. When that expertise is combined with years of investment and innovation in trading technology, we build solutions no one can match as evidenced by our proprietary LME algorithmic trading suite and complex FIX offering.”

Marex Spectron’s trading platform is live now for access to the LME but will be made available for clients using other exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and The Intercontinental Exchange, in the near future.

Nick Benson, Chief Technology Officer at Marex Spectron, said: “Technology development is critical to our commodities businesses. We have therefore chosen to build our own trading solutions to ensure optimal performance for the markets our clients participate in.

“This platform is the result of that collaboration between technology and our active market participants. It solves a very real problem that our brokers and clients encounter every day and demonstrates how we intend to deploy our significant investment in technology in the future.”

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For further information please contact Richard Lindsay at Marex Spectron on +44 (0)20 7650 4091 or rlindsay@marexspectron.com