Endace joins STAC Benchmark Council to help automated trading meet the requirements of MiFID-II

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — May 24, 2016 — Endace, a global leader in high-speed network monitoring and recording technology, announced today that it has joined the STAC Benchmark Council.

“Following our recent spin-off, we are pleased to be renewing our longstanding support for STAC, and the automated trading community,” said Endace CEO, Stuart Wilson. “We’ve had a long relationship with STAC, which has used our technology for many years in its test labs to measure the performance of solutions for automated trading. We are keen to work with the community again and bring our expertise in highly accurate timestamping, lossless network recording, packet capture accuracy and replay to bear on setting and measuring performance standards for the financial industry.”

The STAC Benchmark Council is a community of financial institutions and vendors that collaborate to develop technology benchmark standards for the financial industry. Industry members include the world’s largest banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops; and vendors serving the financial industry.

Endace is also a platinum sponsor of the STAC Summits in London, Chicago and New York, where Wilson and Endace’s CTO, Dr. Stephen Donnelly, are sharing the results of a field study comparing the accuracy of GPS and PTP timing in a live HFT environment – allowing automated traders to make sound decisions in the face of looming MiFID-II requirements.

Dr. Donnelly’s field testing demonstrated that PTP accuracy in a WAN environment is highly dependent on the environment it is being deployed in, and is sensitive to factors such as physical path changes or congestion queueing.

The conclusion from Dr. Donnelly’s testing is that GPS should still be preferred as the gold standard for accurate synchronization. In environments where GPS time sources are not feasible, PTP may provide a possible solution in depending on the accuracy required, but 1) its accuracy is very dependent on the architecture and components of the network on which it is deployed, and 2) ensuring accuracy in a WAN environment is much more difficult to do.