Pure Trading, Canada’s first competitive auction market for exchange listed securities, successfully completed its fourth industry test with a record number of participants and vendors, Ian Bandeen, vice chariman and CEO announced today.

“This is an historic day,” Bandeen said after the test concluded late Saturday afternoon. “We had an excellent test with seven vendors providing over 165 direct connections to our exchange. Participants came into the test from across Canada and the United States.”

“The opening was perfect with over 5,200 trades executed in less than a second,” said Richard Carleton, vp corporate development of Pure Trading. “Later on in the load testing phase we had individual players sending order flow at more than 700 per a second. At peak order flow input, the system averaged less than 3% CPU utilization. As one of the vendors cleaned up its order book, we saw 12,833 trades being executed in a second.”

“We have signed up 58 dealers representing over 95 per cent of the historic Canadian equity trading volume”, Bandeen added. “Our plan is to bring third party testers in from the U.S. before the end of the month to do formal benchmarking of the key latency and throughput metrics. We have every reason to believe that these final statistics will compare very favourably with the best available globally.”

Carleton said the company will consult this week with participants to get their comments on the test. Following that, it will set a launch timeline that allows key vendors to complete their regression testing and finalize roll-out plans with their customers to ensure the Canadian equity trading system can participate when Pure Trading goes live.

“This has been a tremendous collective endeavour and we really appreciate the time, resources and support provided by so many members of the trading community. It will be great to see the full benefits of a multi-market trading environment unfold in Canada,” Carleton said.

Pure Trading, which is operated by Canadian Trading and Quotation System Inc., is meant to be a competitive alternative to the existing exchanges, providing a new trading venue for Canadian Exchange-listed securities.