Sterling TT Improves Trading Display for Work-From-Home Traders

Chicago-based trading terminal provider Sterling Trading Tech has rolled out a series of updates and enhancements to its workstation, designed specifically to address challenges created by trading professionals being forced to work from home during the Covid-19 outbreak.

“Since the outbreak of Covid, the global capital markets have seen a spike in message traffic because of volatility … and with everyone working from home, the internet has come under stress,” says Jim Nevotti, president of Sterling. “So we’ve spent a lot of money on infrastructure and servers to ensure we can handle these volumes.”

But whereas Sterling’s clients typically sat on professional trading floors, using high-powered desktop computers with multiple screens, and fast, high-bandwidth wired communications, they may now be limited to working on a laptop computer with a small screen, and where their home WiFi internet is already being shared with other family members who may also be working from home, or children who may be using it for remote learning, or for streaming games and movies.

“We recognize that people trading from home have a laptop rather than an office space and a work computer, so we’ve issued some guidelines around usage and the strain on infrastructure, and we’ve done a lot of front-end work on what professional platforms need to look like in the time of Covid,” focusing on the broad theme of optimizing performance and improving speed and responsiveness, Nevotti says.

For example, the vendor has optimized all data messages that pass through its systems, minimizing the size of each message so that it can be displayed as quickly as possible, and also looked in detail at how messages travel over the platform to each window in the front-end display, to ensure that each component window receives the same data at the exact same time. As a result, the system now renders charts faster.

Sterling also introduced an “anti-alias” option to make its charts display clearer and crisper as traders struggle to adapt from multiple large screens to a single laptop-sized screen. And in the workstation’s Trading Monitor window of order activity, Sterling has made its gridlines—which separate different orders in the display—crisper, to make it easier for traders to differentiate order data when using a smaller display.

“People have had to figure out how to get the same information that they used before and compress it so they can see it all on one screen. Sterling Trader Pro is customizable, so you can change the layout around, and make windows bigger or smaller … but we still spent a lot of effort on customer service to make sure clients were set up so they could trade and manage risk,” Nevotti says.