About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

InfoReach Proposes Universal “Ticker” Symbols to Test Trade and Routing Connectivity without Risk

Subscribe to our newsletter

Global electronic trading technology provider InfoReach is pioneering an initiative to reduce common problems and costs that arise during the process of enabling connectivity between trading counterparties.

Through the collaborative use of a single set of “fake” symbols, market participants can verify live routing and trading capabilities and test new algorithms without the need to put real money in the markets. The symbols proposed by InfoReach are OOOO and 0000 (for numeric symbology markets).

While a few of the largest exchanges offer their own test symbols—such as “ZVZZT” for NASDAQ—there is no standard symbol that is universally recognized and easily remembered. Furthermore, many trading participants around the world do not support the use of any test instruments, forcing their counterparties to use actual financial instruments in the production environment.

By using OOOO and 0000, market participants can verify production readiness between counterparties, “ping” connectivity on a regular basis and detect problems before they affect live transactions. The symbols will work across all trading counterparties and global destinations (sell side, buy side, exchanges, ECNs and other routing destinations, etc.).

“Configuring connectivity is a largely manual process involving many parties and components, and any changes introduced on either side of the connection can adversely affect order handling between counterparties,” explains InfoReach CEO Allen Zaydlin. “Global adoption of our universal test symbols will benefit all market participants by making the process more efficient and reducing unnecessary costs and risk,” he adds.

Simple implementation

There is no cost for using the test symbols and implementation is simple. After adding the symbols to their Security Master, traders send a “dummy” order in the production environment using the appropriate symbol.

Once the dummy order is received, the trading counterparty must acknowledge receipt of the order and/or simulate execution. The lack of order acknowledgment/execution or rejection of the order will indicate that the ability to handle live orders might be compromised at the transaction destination.

Supporters of the initiative are asked to indicate participation by notifying InfoReach at testsymbol@inforeachinc.com

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

ISDA Finds GenAI Highly Accurate in Contracts Process but Stresses Need for Good Data

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) has found that a range of generative artificial intelligence models can achieve a very high level of accuracy in extracting and standardising contract details into digital form. The findings suggest that AI can be deployed to reduce time and resources as well as risks when processing data within...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Best Practice Client Onboarding

Client onboarding is central to the success of banks, yet it continues to present challenges and the benefits of getting it right are difficult to achieve. The challenges arise from siloed systems, manual processes and poor entity data quality. The potential benefits of successful implementation include excellent client experience, improved client acquisition and loyalty, new business opportunities, reductions in costs, competitive advantage, and confidence in compliance.