BSE to boost trading speed, offer daily jobs and consumer data

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) is upgrading itself with improved speed and new data services that would enable investors to better decide on the various choices.

While the BSE claims to be the world's fastest exchange already, the exchange is looking at even faster trading on its platform.

BSE, which earlier this month, reported to have clocked a median trade speed of six micro seconds, is aiming for a much faster speed of 200 nano seconds for the trades executed on its platform, in the next three years.

Asia's oldest stock exchange will also be providing data on unemployment and consumer sentiment, which play a key role in investment decisions.

Most available data at present come out with a time lag and cannot be relied upon for making investment decisions. BSE will now be updating data on jobs and consumer sentiment on a regular basis, reports quoting Ashishkumar Chauhan, BSE's MD and CEO, said.

If things work out as planned, BSE could be the first to provide unemployment data on a daily basis. Even in the US where economic data is provided on a regular basis, jobs data is issued on a monthly basis.

Availability of consumer and jobs data on a regular basis will also help policy decisions, including monetary policy and investments.

For the data services, BSE has tied up with the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, which will undertake actual collection of data from 1,58,000 households, covering 3,000 locations. Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, is a partner in the estimation of consumer sentiment indices. The sample size will be the same for both indices.

BSE has been working and experimenting on many advanced technologies, including FPGA (field-programmable gate array) which would help increase the speed of trades.

BSE had taken almost three years to come out of its old data centre and old network with a new data centre that went live on 25 September this year.

The exchange is in the process of shifting the servers to new data centre over next few weeks.

Once the data centre is fully operational, BSE expects to provide additional services and greater speed of transactions.