Elasticia® Exchange Trading System

Elasticia is the exchange trading system that has empowered the NGM exchange since November 2010, Spotlight Stock Market since November 2017 and BX Swiss since April 2018. It has proven reliable since day one and has been a key in the establishment of Nordic Growth Market in the Nordics.

Elasticia is developed and maintained by Nordic Growth Market and has been crafted to meet the demands for high throughput and low latency of the financial market. Since its first launch in 2010, Elasticia has a proven track record with only one technical interruption of the market.

Below you find some of the reasons for why we love the system and why it is being praised by some of Europe's top-tier banks.

Low latency

NGM hosts thousands of ETP instruments that are heavily quoted by the market makers. The quotes of the ETP’s in the NGM markets are directly related to the underlying securities’ quotes as well as the fluctuations in the currency rates of the underlyings’ traded currency and the currency of the ETPs’. Let’s put it this way – the system manages a huge amount of transactions each second with sub-millisecond latency figures.

Standard protocols

In order to simplify electronic communication between parties in the financial industry, standards have emerged. Systems communicate with Elasticia for trading and real-time market data through the community standards FIX 5.0 with FAST 1.1 compression.

Reliability

Software

At NGM we believe simplicity is a key to high software quality – from the architecture to the design and to the lines of code in the system. The simpler the solution – the easier the maintenance and further development. Add to this rigorous automated test suits and well defined release processes and you have three key factors to Elasticia’s reliability.

Management

A reliable system requires a reliable management of the system and automation is favored to manual interaction. Scriptable interfaces allows for automation of IT operations as well as market operations.

Network

Apart from having the possibility to manage network resilience on the network level, connecting systems may connect multiple redundant sessions over separate networks to ensure redundancy on the application layer as well.

Site replication

Site replication is supported and allows for rolling over operations to a recovery site, would the disaster on the primary site be the case.

Scriptable automation

Elasticia supports easy scriptable management and automation of the IT and market operations. Anything from small and simple tasks such as managing user accounts to larger and more complex tasks can be scripted through the Elasticia scripting engine. The engine provides a single interface to manage the system in a uniform way. As a compliment to the scripting engine day to day market administration can also be managed through the market administration GUI.

Examples of usage:

• Integration of existing external data sources and tools to manage markets, instrument data, user accounts etc. 
• Source realtime information from external sources to automatically adjust the state of an instrument
• Setup and administration of system components

Horizontal and vertical scalability

Although Elasticia in its basic setup with one single instance of each core component performs extremely well, we know that the development in the financial markets demands a never ending need to for more and more transactions to be managed. If the basic setup is not enough, the Elasticia components can be split up in multiple instances without any loss of latency, and most components can be scaled out in runtime.

Built for expansion

As the name indicates, Elasticia is an elastic system. The hardware requirements are modest and a full setup of the core trading system can be run on a single commodity server. As the need for more performance evolves new hardware can easily be accommodated and the Elasticia system scaled. The system components is then easily setup and managed through the scriptable management interface.

The market is changing all the time. Regulators publish new requirements, market participants request new functionality, the exchange wants to differentiate from its competitors. An exchange must never rest and for the exchange trading system, this means that an endless number of expansions are rolling in. We have been operating our markets for many years, and we live with it. We focus on keeping the architecture of the system and the design of the components as simple and clean as possible and this is essential for our ability to quickly move from request to roll-out.

Notable features of Elasticia that provides for a long and rewarding use of the system:

• Simple and powerful architecture and design that promotes quick turnaround times when extending the system with new functionality
• Simple scaling of the system components
• Modest commodity HW requirements even for the high-end system setup