NEC NEC010553 Applications

Applications at the forefront of technology
The Montreal Exchange
The Montreal Exchange
plays an important role in the Canadian economic
market. Established in 1874, the Exchange is recognized as the Canadian leader in
derivative products and trades between 40,000 and 50,000 contracts a day. To
effectively manage the continual flow of financial information, the Montreal Exchange
depends on the speed and organizational capacities of state-of-the-art technology,
epecially when it comes to presenting financial data on their trading floors.
the challenge
In the volatile and explosive financial industry, exchange markets have to act fast to
ensure that traders have all the relevant financial information they need while on the
trading floor. Exchanges face the challenge of providing a technologically advanced
facility that allows traders to maximize their speed and performance.
The Montreal Exchange originally deployed groups of five 18-inch computer
monitors on its perimeter trading floor walls, and each displayed just a single page
of information at a time. Like most Exchanges, they were using older LED boards
that were too large and bulky to place within a trading floor pit. To optimize and
centralize underlying cash prices, the Montreal Exchange needed advanced
technology to provide traders with the necessary information to effectively execute
buy and sell orders for members and their own personal accounts on the trading
floor.
"Traders are under constant pressure to make instant transaction decisions," said
Richard Bourbonniere, Vice President of Floor Operations at the Montreal Exchange.
"We wanted to make their jobs easier by using a display system that could operate
in real-time and provide traders with instant information that is easy to interpret."