Exact time
16:30:00
The session transition fires at a configured time. The straightforward case, and the one members can plan around to the second.
Platform · Module 02
Market Control Panel
The operator’s single point of control over the market, and it needs nothing but a browser. Configuration, supervision and governance in one console — and every operator action is processed by the engine through the same validated, sequenced, journaled path as an order.
- Access
- Browser only
- Approval
- Maker–checker, four eyes
- Configuration
- Versioned, no restart
- Audit trail
- The trading journal
A venue a small team can actually run.
Market operations is usually where a trading platform quietly becomes expensive: a console for one thing, a database script for another, and a vendor ticket for the rest. Here the whole surface an operations team needs is one web application, and there are seven areas of control in it.
- Market and instrument administration
- List new instruments; maintain tick tables, lot sizes, price bands and trading calendars. Changes are published as versioned reference-data bundles and take effect without an engine restart.
- Session control
- Open, close, halt and resume markets or individual instruments; schedule opening and closing auctions; run intra-day and volatility auctions.
- Automated timetables
- Drive the whole trading day from a configured schedule — exact times, randomized auction windows, or chained triggers — with manual operator commands always taking precedence.
- Live market supervision
- A real-time order-book viewer including hidden iceberg quantities, a trade blotter showing both counterparties, participant positions, and risk-limit headroom monitoring.
- Participant and risk administration
- Onboard brokers and their clients, assign named risk profiles, and adjust limits with immediate effect.
- Corporate actions
- Share increases and decreases, dividend adjustments, reference-price corrections and instrument-metadata updates, applied safely between sessions.
- Governance
- Role-based access control and maker–checker (four-eyes) approval for every market-affecting action, with a complete audit trail of who requested, who approved and what the system did.
A new instrument is a configuration change.
Instruments, tick tables, lot sizes, price bands and trading calendars are all maintained in the Control Panel. A change is not applied by editing live state: it is published as a versioned reference-data bundle, and the new bundle takes effect without an engine restart.
That versioning is what makes the configuration answerable later. Every change is a new bundle version with full history, so the question “what was the tick table on the day of that trade?” has a recorded answer rather than a reconstructed one. The same bundles are published to participants over the reference-data interface, so operator, engine and member firm are reading the same version.
What is maintained here
- Instrument definitions — symbol, ISIN, asset class and instrument metadata.
- Tick tables, which may vary by price band, and lot sizes. An order whose price is not a multiple of the applicable tick is rejected on entry by the matching engine.
- Price bands, and the price-movement tolerances that govern regular-trading price monitoring.
- Trading calendars, session configurations and per-instrument schedules, including per-day overrides for IPOs and low-liquidity instruments.
- Reference prices, which the operator may also set manually — for a newly listed instrument, for example, or following a corporate action.
The trading day runs itself, until you take it back.
The operator can open, close, halt and resume a whole market or a single instrument, schedule the opening and closing auctions, and run intra-day and volatility auctions. Day to day, though, the schedule does the work: the full trading day can be automated with session timetables, configured per market with per-instrument overrides.
Randomized window
09:30 + up to 120 s
The transition fires at an undisclosed moment inside a published window — an established anti-gaming measure for auction uncrossings, since nobody can time an order to the instant of the cross.
Chained
on completion of Pre-Open
The transition fires when the preceding session completes, rather than at a clock time. Useful where one session’s length is not fixed in advance.
What the operator can see that the market cannot.
Supervision is a privileged view, and deliberately so. The operator sees the book as the engine holds it, not as it is published.
Order-book viewer
The book in real time, including hidden iceberg quantities. Concealed volume is invisible in public market data and visible to the supervising operator — that asymmetry is the point of the function.
Trade blotter
Prints as they happen, showing both counterparties. Public market data is anonymous; surveillance is not.
Participant positions
Positions per participant, derived from the trade stream, so an operator can see concentration building rather than discover it in an end-of-day report.
Risk-limit headroom
How much of each applicable limit a member has consumed, monitored live — the same limits risk management evaluates at order entry.
Members, limits, and the things you can only do between sessions.
Participant and risk administration
Brokers and their end clients are onboarded here, under the Firm / Node / User hierarchy, and each is assigned a named risk profile — a reusable limit set applied per clearing member, firm, client, instrument or market, with a configurable default as fallback.
Limit changes apply immediately, without a restart. That matters in the moment a member calls to say a limit is wrong: the correction is an approved configuration change, not a maintenance window. Participant onboarding and maintenance carries maker–checker approval and a complete audit history, in common with every other market-affecting action.
Corporate actions
Share increases and decreases, dividend adjustments, reference-price corrections and instrument-metadata updates are applied safely between sessions rather than against a live book. The Post-Trade session at the end of the day is exactly that window: participants are locked out, and deferred configuration changes and corporate actions are applied.
The effect is that an adjustment which changes the meaning of a price never lands halfway through a trading session, and the day it applies from is recorded in the bundle version that carries it.
Two people, and a record of both.
Role-based access control decides who may attempt an action. Maker–checker — four-eyes — approval decides whether it happens: every market-affecting action is requested by one authorised person and approved by another. The audit trail then records who requested it, who approved it, and what the system actually did.
AdminCommand seq 18,442,911 ts 11:04:17.902551 action HALT INSTRUMENT ACME.EQ reason PRICE_MONITORING_REVIEW maker ops.k.rahimi (role MARKET_OPS) checker ops.s.davies (role MARKET_OPS_APPROVER) state COMMITTED (pre-execution) MarketEvent seq 18,442,912 instrument ACME.EQ session HALTED effect automatic execution suspended
Role-based access control
Operators hold roles, and roles carry entitlements. A user who may view the order book is not thereby a user who may halt an instrument, and a maker is not their own checker.
A complete audit history
Requests, approvals, rejections and the resulting system behaviour are all recorded. Because the record is the engine’s own sequence rather than an application log written alongside it, there is no version of events to reconcile.
The point
Every operator action travels the same path as an order.
A Control Panel command is not a privileged side channel into the engine’s state. It is a command on the same ingress, validated the same way, assigned its place in the same single gap-free sequence, and written to the same append-only journal before it executes. The audit trail of market operation is therefore as rigorous as the audit trail of trading itself.
The practical consequence is that a replay of the journal reproduces the operator as well as the market: the halt, the auction that followed it, who asked for it and who approved it, in sequence. A regulator asking what happened at 11:04 gets one answer.
Next step
Tell us about your market. We will show you the engine matching.
A live demonstration runs about an hour: the order book, the Control Panel, an auction uncrossing, and a replay of the journal that produced it.