BlueCrest spends big on rapid-trading "arms race"

EXEC DIGITAL UK (Dec 2 2009)

1. Buildings beside Buckingham Palace and in the unexceptional English town of Basildon are among the centres of a quiet revolution in European stock markets as trading firms and funds seek to boost lightning-fast trades by a few millionths of a second. Basildon, near London, is where NYSE/EuroNext, which runs four European bourses, is setting up a huge new data centre to cut out the milliseconds lost when trading orders cross the North Sea. And secretive hedge fund firm BlueCrest is running some of the "black boxes" it uses for automated trading in screen-filled trading offices once used by Enron, overlooking Buckingham Palace gardens in London. It also has another data centre south of the River Thames. With assets under management of about $15 billion (8.9 billion pounds), of which around 60 percent is in its black box systematic trading strategies, BlueCrest relies on powerful computers that run programs ... (Read Full Article)

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