Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) announced today (Wednesday) that an upgrade of its securities market trading system (AMS/3) from the current AMS/3.5 version to AMS/3.8 will be rolled out on 5 December 2011 (Monday).  The rollout plan follows the successful completion of a series of market rehearsals and Exchange Participants’ (EPs’) confirmation of their readiness. 

The upgrade will increase the securities market’s efficiency and transparency and pave the way for future growth.  It will increase the trading system’s processing capacity over the current capacity by about 10-fold to 30,000 orders per second, scalable to 150,000 orders per second, and reduce latency to 2 milliseconds on an average trading day, about 70 times faster than present and better than the project target of 9 milliseconds at 30,000 orders per second.

Market transparency will also be improved as AMS/3.8 will display the 10 best price levels compared to the five best price levels in AMS/3.5.  In addition, the market data broadcast rate will be doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 stock page updates per second and some legacy system functions will be streamlined to improve EPs’ operational efficiency.

“Continuing to upgrade our platform infrastructure and market structure is a key part of our current three-year strategic plan so the AMS/3.8 system upgrade is an important step for us,” said HKEx Chief Executive Charles Li.  “AMS/3.8 is an interim move that will give us a good window to develop our next generation trading system to meet market needs, support our further growth and help maintain Hong Kong’s position as an international financial centre.”  

As a prudent measure, there will be a two-week stabilisation period from 5 to 16 December during which fallback procedures will be in place to allow HKEx to return to AMS/3.5 in the unlikely event it needs to do so.

HKEx would like to thank EPs for their cooperation and participation in various market rehearsals and other preparation work for the rollout of AMS/3.8. 

Ends