Chicago-based Rival Systems (Rival), a trading software company established last year, announced today that the latest version of its platform further reduces latency by 25 percent. The significant speed increase improves on a platform already widely regarded as the fastest in the industry.

Rival employed software optimization to achieve the reduction in median “tick-to-trade” latency for its clients, which include professional trading groups, market makers and commodity trading advisors (CTAs).  The upgrade is seamless for users of Rival Trader and Rival API, with no additional costs or need to modify their automated trading strategies. 

Rival CEO Robert D’Arco said:  “Our clients will immediately see the benefits of this substantial latency reduction. Many of our users have run side-by-side comparisons of our platform against our competition and repeatedly proven that our system is the fastest. This upgrade, which further widens the gap with our competitors, reinforces our commitment to continually push the boundaries and enhance the system for our users.

“We have a team of experts devoted to making improvements and responding to user needs. We’re focused not only on latency but on premier features that enable our clients to trade smarter. To that end, we’ll soon roll out new advanced auto hedging features and underlying price calculations based on market microstructure to help users capture more edge in the market.”

Rival measures latency by using an external process that time-stamps the market data when it enters the network and again when the corresponding order leaves the network. The firm is the only trading software company to provide users with reports showing the true tick-to-trade latency of every order.