I just stumbled on Marketcetera, our industry’s first open source STP trading platform. This isn’t really for investment advisors, it’s for hedge funds and large trading desks that use FIX to do straight through processing. I would assume it competes with Advent Moxy and FlexTrade. Or *will* compete, since it’s still under development.

From their web site:

A true alternative to expensive, monolithic proprietary trading systems or brittle software mashups, the Marketcetera Platform is a comprehensive open-source software infrastructure of ready-to-use components that gives users maximum flexibility and technology choice.

This is really exciting. I hadn’t realized anybody outside of our own FinFolio effort was working on an open source project for wealth management. They’re using traditional open source Java-based tools, but also released a .Net API as a concession (one would assume) to the large numbers of Microsoft silo programmers in our industry.

This isn’t a modeling/rebalancing platform like iRebal or Tamarack. It’s designed to make individual trades across many accounts, block them up, and shoot them to a broker/dealer or an exchange using the FIX protocol. The assumption is that most users would strap their own trading algorithms onto the software. I suppose there’s no reason rebalancing or portfolio management software couldn’t export trades to them, as they have many ways to get trades into the system.

Marketcetera is four people, all Wall Street/hedge fund veterans. They’re on release 0.41, indicating they don’t think it’s ready for prime-time yet. Their web site also doesn’t mention any large clients yet, and their feature tracking database only has activity from a few outside companies.

But a new company should be judged mostly on their technology. I tend to put a lot of stock in the look-and-feel of the GUI. Bad front ends usually mean bad software. But in this case, the interface looks extremely clean. I also like that the order manager is written in a desktop front-end instead of trying mash it into a web browser.

The .NET API looks clean and could be easily integrated into something like FinFolio or even Techfi’s old stuff. Advent, Tamarack and anybody with a trading platform should be nervously watching these guys. This could be a Very Big Deal.