Adobe Success Story

NASDAQ leverages Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to deliver a RIA on the desktop that enables financial professionals to replay market activity in detail at any point in time

Since its debut in 1971 as the world’s first electronic stock market, NASDAQ has been at the forefront of innovation by using technology to bring millions of investors together with the world’s leading companies.

The responsibility for developing products that can manage enormous amounts of trading data and deliver it to customers in relevant, interactive ways falls to the Market Data Product Development team at NASDAQ. According to Randall Hopkins, vice president at NASDAQ, all types of investors, traders and brokers will benefit from being able to replay what happened in the market.

Project Details

“When investors receive trade confirmations, they often don’t know what happened between the time they placed their order and the moment their trade was executed,” says Hopkins. “They want to know why the final price is different than the ‘real-time’ price they saw when they placed the order. It’s really about understanding why they got a price and whether it was fair.”

Checks and balances
The NASDAQ product development team turned to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to create NASDAQ Market Replay. The dynamic application gives users instant insight into extremely detailed trading activity in the market at any time during the day. For example, users can query when a stock trade happened and play forward and backward the market events as if they were watching the market in real time.

While the complexities of equity trading are enormous – with millions of orders continuously traveling many different paths to central markets, one thing remains constant: investors want to get the best price possible. Hopkins explains that the new Adobe AIR application will enable brokers to show their customers exactly what was going on in the market at the time a trade happened, helping them understand why they received a particular price.

Improving productivity
To minimize bandwidth demands, the Adobe AIR application manages the data for the replays. “There’s no doubt that working in Adobe AIR is a huge benefit with these large data sets,” says Hopkins. “The ability to process trading data on the desktop enables NASDAQ to deliver valuable data analysis at a lower cost to everyone involved.” For example, a compliance officer may receive a report indicating that some trades may not have occurred at the appropriate price. The officer can use the NASDAQ Market Replay to reconstruct the quotes at the time of the trades, move forward and backward to look for the timestamp mismatches, and zoom into the millisecond level to see quotes that lasted less than a millisecond. After completing the analysis, the officer can show the NASDAQ-official replay or screenshots to customers or regulators to verify compliance.

According to Hopkins, NASDAQ Market Replay will help all sorts of market participants better understand and explain the market. For example, an analyst or journalist will be able to replay market events for viewers to help them understand significant price changes. “We are entering a world where people will be able to replay interesting market events in simulated real time to experience the event exactly the way it originally happened,” says Hopkins.

From a development perspective, NASDAQ leveraged existing web and network assets, while working in the familiar Adobe Flex framework.

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