Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx) announced last Friday that the stabilisation period for its upgraded securities market trading system, AMS/3.8, has been completed.

The two-week stabilisation period, which began when AMS/3.8 was rolled out on 5 December this year, was a prudent measure to ensure that HKEx, Exchange Participants (EPs) and Information Vendors (IVs) were prepared in the unlikely event that fallback arrangements had to be triggered after the upgrade. AMS/3.8 has been operating smoothly and successfully so no fallback arrangements were required during the stabilisation period.

As a result of the upgrade, the trading system’s processing capacity has been increased by about 10-fold to 30,000 orders per second, scalable to 150,000 orders per second, and latency has been reduced to 2 milliseconds on an average trading day, about 70 times faster than before. AMS/3.8 processed an average of 7 million orders and 716,000 trades a day over the past two weeks, and the average host processing latency was 1.5 milliseconds.

Market transparency has been enhanced as AMS/3.8 displays the 10 best price levels compared to the five best price levels in the previous trading system, AMS/3.5. In addition, the market data broadcast rate has doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 stock page updates per second and some legacy system functions have been streamlined to improve EPs’ operational efficiency.