ICE develops and maintains its trading platform and the global infrastructure that supports its electronic markets. The platform is accessible via ICE’s global connection hub network, ICE’s fully-managed wide-area-network private line connections directly into the exchange, and the Internet.
During the initiative to increase the speed and scale of its electronic trading platform, ICE implemented new matching engines for the trading of futures and cleared OTC contracts, re-architected its internal messaging systems, upgraded matching-engine servers, and tuned each component of the platform to maximize efficiency in execution and processing. ICE also improved its APIs to reduce customer bandwidth requirements, upgraded its network hardware, and re-engineered its network design.
In addition, ICE deployed an industry-standard FIX API (Financial Information Exchange - Application Programming Interface) to complement its longstanding Java API. Approximately 20 firms, including many well known statistical-arbitrage and algorithmic trading funds have, or are in the process of, completing connectivity of their customized trading applications to the newly issued FIX API.
To serve its global customer base, ICE opened telecommunications hubs in Chicago, London and Singapore in the past year. These telecommunication hubs are designed to facilitate access and reduce connectivity costs to ICE’s electronic trading platform.
“These transformational changes to the ICE platform are the result of our continuing commitment to innovation in the rapidly growing global energy markets,” said Charles A. Vice, ICE’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “The year-long platform development program positions the ICE platform among the leading derivatives platforms today. We were early proponents of the speed and transparency that electronic trading brings to the energy markets, and we will continue to seek advances in technology to serve the energy marketplace.”
“As a participant in ICE’s markets, we have benefited from the advances in the ICE platform,” said Ethan Kahn from Quiet Light Trading. “The platform is now faster and more flexible than ever.”
The graph below depicts improvements in average data center processing time and average futures daily volume growth over the past year.
As a result of the recent enhancements to the ICE trading platform, the performance of the platform has improved as follows:
- The ICE platform today is 600% faster than at the beginning of 2006, and over 1700% faster than the same time last year, while handling more than ten times the message volume compared to last year. The average round-trip transaction time of approximately 31 milliseconds (ms) is on par with the fastest electronic platforms in the industry. These statistics apply to the round-trip time within the ICE data center from the moment an order reaches the data center, is processed in the matching engine, and sent out of the data center.
- Average round-trip transaction times have continually improved from 586 ms in May 2005 to 216 ms in December 2005; and from 183 ms in April 2006 to 31 ms at the end of May 2006.
- Unlike most futures exchanges, the ICE trading platform achieves its high-speed results while also managing pre-trade counterparty and clearing credit limits. This functionality provides traders and clearing firms with high-quality risk-management at the server level in the highly volatile energy markets.
In April 2005, ICE’s futures business segment, ICE Futures, completed its transition to electronic trading, placing significantly increased demands on the platform. Since the transition to electronic trading, ICE Futures has achieved record volume. Electronic trading in the futures markets on the platform has grown from an average of 33,296 contracts per day just prior to the electronic transition last year, to 338,792 contracts per day in May 2006, representing a 918% increase in electronically traded futures volume.
The ICE platform is the only derivatives platform to host integrated futures and over-the-counter markets, including trade execution, credit management, trade capture and confirmation. The platform allows for access via multiple front ends including WebICE - the industry’s leading web based front end for energy trading. The ICE platform is also accessible via a dozen independent software vendors (ISVs), and is on the desktops of thousands of energy market participants in 41 jurisdictions around the world virtually around the clock each day of the week.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
Statements in this press release regarding IntercontinentalExchange’s business that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see the Company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors in Item 1(A) of the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K (File No. 001-32671), as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 10, 2006, and the risk factors in the Registration Statement on Form S-1, (Reg. No. 333-135060) as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
