Stock Trades Get A BoostStock Trades Get A Boost

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has implemented an equity trading system with in-memory database technology that will help the brokerage keep up with growing stock-trade volumes.

Expanding beyond its commercial banking roots, J.P. Morgan has been building its investment-services business and now handles millions of trades every day, says John O'Hara, the company's VP and global architect for institutional equities technology. The infrastructure J.P. Morgan previously used kept up with trading volume, O'Hara says, but the new system is needed to keep the company competitive as volumes continue to grow.

The software system manages equity trade orders coming in from pension funds, hedge funds, and other institutional clients and sends them on to J.P. Morgan's global program trading system for processing. It uses in-memory data-management software from TimesTen Inc. that manages data stored in a server's physical memory, in contrast to traditional databases that store information on disks. That provides a faster, more reliable way to execute orders and makes it possible to handle larger volumes, O'Hara says.

Financial-services companies are looking to use IT to increase the speed of program trading systems to stay competitive. O'Hara sees J.P. Morgan's system, which can process more than 100,000 queries per second, as the vanguard of a new generation of equity trading applications that will utilize large amounts of cheap computer memory to speed stock trades. "In-memory [technology] is the next logical step in scalability," he says.

J.P. Morgan spent nine months developing the trading system last year and put it into production in November for the brokerage's New York operations. This year, the system will be expanded to Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia/Pacific region. The system runs on Sun Microsystems servers and the 64-bit Solaris operating system and uses Sybase Inc. database software for long-term data storage.