Open Source Trading: Marketcetera Platform 1.0 now Available

Marketcetera – the open source company providing open source software for automated trading systems – on the 14th of January released its new Automated Trading Platform 1.0.

Open Source at Wall Street is getting momentum. The official 1.0 release, originally tentatively scheduled for the last quarter of 2008, has already been adopted by 20 financial institutions, proving that open source can do a lot for the hedge fund industry.

Automated Trading Platform 1.0 simplifies integration with existing IT infrastructure, thanks to improved APIs as well as supporting web services interfaces.  Marketcetera makes business sense of free software, allowing hedge funds and currency traders to implement proprietary and secret trading algorithms on top of a common platform.

Roy Agostino, Marketcetera‘s CMO, makes it clear:

Proprietary traders write algorithms that help them decide what to trade and when to trade. These algorithms are their major differentiators. By contrast, the supporting software is non-differentiating in so much as it doesn’t help them decide which strategic trades to make. By going open source, traders can work on improving the core automated trading platform more efficiently. With proprietary alternatives, traders would most likely have to pay the software company to perform the integration, rather than doing it themselves.

Marketcetera keeping differentiating technology out of the commons, preserves customers confidential ideas and explores new open source value-based business models.