Marketcetera now with real time data

Marketcetera, the open source trading platform, took a major step forward with the launch of real-time market data from ACTIV Financial.

Sure, Marketcetera CEO Graham Miller acknowledged, ACTIV isn't Bloomberg or Reuters. But guess whose data the boys on the floor are using?

"I was one of their first customers at Jane Street Capital. We've been big fans of their feeds. This provides high quality, low latency real time market data to users of our platform."

But here's the real headline. "The integration work we've done allows for faster build-out. This is a drop-in component."

Hedge funds depend on their trading systems to give them their edge, and can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building and rolling out applications.

Now, however, they can collaborate, through Marketcetera, add real-time data, and roll out faster. It's the improved time-to-market an open source process enables that's the key here.

As a result, Miller said, Marketcetera itself may be about to pop.

"We have everything from small hedge funds to large hedge funds," using the software. "We have broker-dealers using us to monitor trading. We have exchanges interested in deploying the platform."

Once open source hits the trading floor, change can only accelerate. It builds slowly, then takes off.