Middle East exchanges live on Avelacom trading network

Key Middle Eastern exchanges have received a boost as one of the main high-speed connectivity providers has made their markets available to its international network of traders.

Bursa Istanbul of Turkey, Israel’s Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Stock Exchange and derivatives market Tadawul are now live on optimised trading routes from Avelacom, the low latency connectivity supplier.

Aleksey Larichev, CEO of Avelacom, said: “As a connectivity provider for the financial services industry we need to identify new trends quickly. This allows us to connect to growing trading venues using our built-and-ready low latency infrastructure and established partnerships.”

Avelacom, which connects many trading centres in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the emerging markets, said it has switched on three new routes: London to Riyadh, New York to Tel Aviv; and Frankfurt to Istanbul.

A London-based trader, for example, can now take advantage of a less than 80 microsecond round trip for trades sent to the Saudi Stock Exchange or Tadawul.

A firm based in New York can send data to and receive a response from Tel Aviv in an average of less than 117 microseconds and Frankfurt-based traders can route orders to Istanbul in an average of less than 32 microseconds, the firm said.

Extremely fast trading links such as these are important to algorithmic traders and market-makers who use these connections to exploit arbitrage opportunities between markets.

Avelacom said in a statement traders are increasingly looking to smaller, emerging markt exchanges for opportunities as the larger, developed markets become commoditised.

The connectivity provider said it wants to establish a “first-mover advantage” by opening up trading links to more of these exchanges.

A report commissioned by Avelacom and published last week by market intelligence firm Acuiti suggested that more than a fifth of prop traders surveyed said they had stepped up efforts to trade cryptocurrencies due to the recent volatility in that market.

Another survey by Acuiti and backed by Avelacom said in May prop traders had responded to higher margin calls by cutting the size of their trades.

Avelacom, which currently connects some 80+ data centres globally, switched on in August 2020 the Brazilian exchange B3.