Penson Financial Services Canada Inc. today announced the release of an upgrade for Penson FX, its foreign exchange trading platform.

Penson’s FX trading system is available to Penson’s clients worldwide and provides traders with desktop access to competitive tradable prices, real time streaming charts and news, technical analysis, reporting and communication tools.

With the new upgrade, Penson introduces the concept of auto-dealing to its FX clients. Traders connected to Penson FX are enabled to act on live tradable prices by securing automatic and instantaneous executions on most of their deals. Auto-dealing is designed to increase the overall efficiency of the trading process by reducing delays and slippage costs.

The new version of Penson FX also comes with a strong support for the FIX protocol, a feature highly sought by sophisticated financial institutions and trading desks. FIX protocol provides market participants with a standardized convenient way to exchange real time financial data through a set of widely accepted digital instructions. By adding FIX support to its currency trading platform, Penson allows its clients to achieve connectivity between their own FX trading applications and its dealing desk.

The FIX enabled version of Penson FX is particularly suitable for algorithmic arbitrage or proprietary trading, involving a black box application. In recent years, this segment has become increasingly popular as more and more market participants rely on computers to automate their trading decisions.

“Penson Canada is pleased to release an improved version of an already extremely well received platform,” said Rene Aoun, foreign exchange Manager at Penson Financial Services Canada, in a news release. “Two years after the original launch, the system has grown to serve over twenty brokerage firms, with a daily trading volume increasing to more than $100 million.”

Penson Financial Services Canada, Inc. is a technology-focused provider of securities services outsourcing, offering flexible customized solutions to all types of financial institutions globally.