Few can have missed the

href="http://finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21031"

target="_blank">announcement this week that the

LSE's new low latency platform, Millennium Exchange,

will be up and running in September. This comes just months after

its acquisition of the Sri Lankan firm, Millennium IT, which

supplies the technology and is testimony to the new thinking now

taking place at the LSE. The same news item also mentions that

the LSE has adopted a "self certification

procedure" for the transition which will place the onus

on the trading community to ready itself for the new platform.

This is a canny move by the LSE as it enables them to regain the

initiative and, at the same time, set the agenda for its members

and technology partners. This is because both will need to focus

on ensuring an orderly transition to the new platform between now

and the go-live date.

Jeremy Grant's

article on

href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cbbc3de6-10f3-11df-9a9e-00144feab49a,s01=1.html"

target="_blank">FT Trading Room earlier this week

highlights what all the fuss is about: latency and the growing

number of High Frequency Traders who supply more and more of the

liquidity in today's markets. Whilst we can all debate

whether the HFT phenomenon is a good or a bad thing, they are

most definitely here to stay and have been a fundamental force in

fragmenting liquidity both in the US and in Europe. Now that

Tokyo has joined the low latency debate with the TSE's

new arrowhead platform it will be interesting to see if this

ignites the fragmentation fuse in Asia too.

This headlong rush to low latency must of course be

accompanied by due consideration for resilience and failover.

Most technologists agree that there is a basic trade-off between

speed and resilience - the faster you go the harder it is to put

the car back on the track if something goes wrong. In the US,

this is much less of an issue as the rest of the market provides

resilience in the event of a glitch at any one venue. As we have

seen in Europe, however, the lack of a consolidated tape and

other factors mean that trading seems to simply stop in the event

of an outage at a primary exchange.

On this

point, it was interesting to see the results of our own poll on

how best to solve the current issues surrounding the lack of a

European consolidated tape. 60% favoured a collaborative approach

as opposed to more regulation. With the stakes so high, and so

many vested interests, it will be a great achievement if we can

solve these issues ourselves without more

"help" from the regulators.