Trading Technologies lays off 100 staff
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Trading Technologies lays off 100 staff - FT.com
Trading Technologies International, a developer of futures trading software used across Wall Street desks and in the pits of the Chicago exchanges, is laying off a large number of staffers just weeks after the rollout of a major new product.
The privately held firm is cutting some 100 of its roughly 600 staffers, including 80 in its home office in Chicago and the rest spread out across its offices, which are in London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong.
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Trading Technologies lays off 100 staff - FT.com
“As we’ve become more focused and efficient over the past few years, we made a difficult but necessary decision to lay off about 100 employees,” the company said in a statement.
The cut comes amid persistently weak volumes in derivatives markets that have pressured revenues for trading technology firms, as it has for traders, banks and brokerages.
CME Group said that average daily futures volumes were down 21 per cent so far this quarter versus the same period a year ago.
However, a person close to the group said that the move is an “organisational restructuring”, the result of an overexpansion just before the financial crisis. This is the first staff reduction for Trading Technologies since 2001.
“It’s been clear for the past six months or so that headcount was too high,” this person said. “This is not a reflection of trading volumes.”
The cuts will come from a variety of roles, but primarily engineers and IT support staff.
Despite the poor volumes, Trading Technologies has continued to unveil new trading tools. In March, it launched a new version of its core platform, X_TRADER. This included the Algo Design Lab, known as ADL, which allows traders to visually assemble automated trading engines and quickly launch them.
The company also recently named Rick Lane, the developer of ADL, as its chief technology officer. Mr Lane had left the group after it acquired the maker of ADL, to work at Google, but rejoined Trading Technologies last month.
Traders increasingly rely on automated decision engines known as algorithms, or “algos”, to rapidly trade futures or
pair trades of related assets.
In addition to software, Trading Technologies also offers “co-location” services to put traders’ systems close to exchange hubs to increase their speed.
Though common to equities and the subject of scrutiny by some regulators such as the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, algos are seeing growing use in other asset classes. ITG and Bank of America Merrill Lynch rolled out new electronic futures trading tools for their institutional clients last year.