

The third largest stock exchange in America is a startup - danteembermage
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158587/

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elecengin
BATS does not only compete on price and speed. It offers many unique order
types tailored to it's main market - high speed traders. Targeting high speed
traders gave BATS an advantage because those are the customers that make
exchanges money - both because of volume, and the specific types of orders
they use. High speed traders traditionally try to avoid the automated routing
that traditional orders go through to match and fill. A high speed trader
would like to know the fees with certainty, and routing opens up the risk of
unexpected fees. Therefore, many high speed traders mark their trades for no
routing. This benefits the exchanges since the liquidity stays on their
exchange and they will collect the fees when/if it fills.

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Flipparachi
Base upon their job description, looks like their messaging platform is built
on C++ and then they want some Python...
[http://www.batstrading.com/resources/employment/bats_trading...](http://www.batstrading.com/resources/employment/bats_trading_job_description_software_developer_kc.pdf)

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mildweed
Parts of it are in PHP too. Not sure which parts, I never got hired there, but
they were hiring for PHP about a year ago.

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mindaugas
It's a fine example of B2B startup.

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jacquesm
Stock exchanges the way they are right now have no real right to existence any
more anyway. All the trading could be direct between buyers and sellers using
a fairly simple web interface.

No more people picking up on the 'buzz' and trading on their own account
either that way.

Of course that would remove all the fee structures that have been created over
the years.

I doubt it will happen though.

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elecengin
I am not sure you understand - BATS is an ECN, not an exchange. In fact, most
trading is on ECNs nowadays. An ECN is basically what you describe - typically
a web application (usually using a protocol called FIX) that matches buyers
with sellers.

Of course they charge a fee - there is a cost to running the data centers and
ensuring regulatory compliance.

See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communication_Networ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communication_Network)

~~~
nowtown
BATS _is_ a Reg-NMS protected exchange on par with Nasdaq, Arca, NYSE and all
the others.

