Reuters To Introduce 80386-Based Art Workstation; Part Of 24-Hour Trading System With CME

Reuters Holdings PLC is preparing to deploy yet another in its seemingly endless line of Advanced Reuter Terminals, an 80386-based trader workstation employing voice recognition. This "ART 386" will be one component of the Reuter Dealer Trading System, or RDTS, which is intended as the backbone of the company's recently announced 24-hour financial futures trading venture with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

A source who's seen the new box says it physically resembles the 386 workstation just released to the OEM market by IDR, Inc., Reuters's captive hardware supplier. The IDR box is a 16 MHz workstation running at about 2.5 MIPS and offering two megabytes of RAM, expandable to eight. IDR has never previously sold to third parties, but it may think the 386 technology it's developed for its parent is sufficiently good to spur outside demand.

Perhaps most interesting about the ART 386, however, is its voice recognition capability. It's designed more as an interactive trader workstation than as a passive quote machine, and voice commands entered through a telephone handset can be used to change bids and offers or cancel all quotes. The device also sports a mouse, although in an effort to save trading desk space, the rodent runs on top of the ART CPU rather than on the desk next to the keyboard.

The ART 386 has been shown to about 40 groups, mostly primary dealers in the government securities market. Unlike other ARTs, though, the version seen recently doesn't run under Microsoft Windows, although it does have a windowed user interface. News headlines, limit alerts, and quotes all appear in dedicated windows, and a pop-up window appears at transaction time.

The after-hours trading system known as Post (Pre) Market Trade will use the RDTS matching network and will operate for the 16 hours a day the CME isn't open. The CME's financial contracts will be available on the system, but agricultural contracts won't be carried. Bids, offers, and trades entered on PMT will be included in the CME's ticker feed for dissemination to other quote vendors.

RDTS won't be available for PMT until early 1989, but until then Reuters will allow CME clearing members to distribute after-hours prices on the Reuter Monitor and SDS2 services. This will let the CME centralize the market for exchange-of-futures-for-physical transactions by disseminating EFP quotes on Reuters, says Ken Cone, CME director of regulatory studies.

In this sense PMT can be viewed as the on-screen formalization of an existing dealer market. The CME estimates that 8-9 percent of its currency volume takes place through EFPs -- after-hours trades permitted under exchange rules.

Although RDTS was developed with the government securities and forex markets in mind, Reuters says it isn't intended to replace the Reuter Monitor Dealing Service currently used for negotiated forex transactions.