It’ll be a dark day in December when the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange fires up its new electronic trading platform, according to some traders.
They think it is a worse platform than the present one, and it could undermine the exchange’s mainstay canola contract.
“Volume in canola is going to drop drastically,” said Ken Ball of Union Securities about the ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) platform. “It’s a real mess.”
But some traders are cautiously optimistic that the new platform can seamlessly replace the E-CBOT platform.
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“It seems to have most of the functionality that we’re looking for,” said Tony Tryhuk, manager of RBC Investments in Winnipeg.
“It does what we want it to do, or at least we think it does what we want it to do, until we connect for real.”
The ICE platform will replace the E-CBOT on the night of Dec. 9, with Dec. 10 being its first full trading day of life.
ICE is being introduced because the Intercontinental Exchange bought the WCE earlier this year and wants to run its own program. The current electronic trading program was operated by the Chicago Board of Trade.
Regardless of the ICE takeover, the WCE platform would have had to change. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange took over the CBOT this year and its platform is replacing the CBOT’s.
Ball is frustrated that the ICE platform does not appear to allow numerous actions now possible on E-CBOT, such as entering open orders and open stop orders. On the new platform only day orders are possible, he said.
“My clients’ reaction was very, very negative,” said Ball.
The ICE platform may be improved, the exchange told him, but there is no firm time for upgrades. The exchange could not be reached for comment.
Tryhuk said he wasn’t worried about some of the perceived weaknesses of the ICE platform. The “front end” program his firm uses allows for many variations of the exchange’s basic trading possibilities including the creation of synthetic open orders, so the reality shouldn’t be much different from today.
“We subscribe to a fairly sophisticated front end trading platform,” said Tryhuk.
“I don’t think that we’re going to lose much functionality in the conversion.”
Until the ICE platform is running, no one knows if it will be an easy transition. Ball doesn’t think much of it.
“It’s an inferior platform, from my point of view,” he said.
