A trading turret or dealer board is a specialized telephony key system that is generally used by financial traders on their

trading desk A trading room gathers traders operating on financial markets. The trading room is also often called the front office. The terms "dealing room" and "trading floor" are also used, the latter being inspired from that of an open outcry stock exc ...

s. Trading has progressed from floor trading through phone trading to

electronic trading Electronic trading, sometimes called e-trading, is the buying and selling of stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, financial derivatives, cryptocurrencies, and other financial instruments online. This is typically done using electronic trading plat ...

during the later half of the twentieth century with phone trading having dominated during the 1980s and 1990s. Although most trading volume is now done via

electronic trading platform In finance, an electronic trading platform, also known as an online trading platform, is a computer software program that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. Various financial products ...

s, some phone trading persists and trading turrets are common on trading desks of investment banks.

Voice trading turrets

Trading turrets, unlike typical phone systems, have a number of features, functions and capabilities specifically designed for the needs of financial traders. Trading turrets enable users to visualize and prioritize incoming call activity from customers or counter-parties and make calls to these same people instantaneously by pushing a single button to access dedicated point-to-point telephone lines (commonly called Ringdown circuits). In addition, many traders have dozens or hundreds of dedicated speed dial buttons and large distribution hoot-n-holler or Squawk box circuits which allow immediate mass dissemination or exchange of information to other traders within their organization or to customers and counter-parties. Due to these requirements many Turrets have multiple handsets and multi-channel speaker units, generally these are shared by teams (for example:

equities Stocks (also capital stock, or sometimes interchangeably, shares) consist of all the shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided. A single share of the stock means fractional ownership of the corporation in proportion t ...

fixed income Fixed income refers to any type of investment under which the borrower or issuer is obliged to make payments of a fixed amount on a fixed schedule. For example, the borrower may have to pay interest at a fixed rate once a year and repay the pr ...

, foreign exchange) or in some cases globally across whole trading organizations. Unlike standard

Private Branch Exchange A business telephone system is a telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing the range of technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX). A business telephone system differs from ...

telephone systems (PBX) designed for general office users, Trading turret system architecture has historically relied on highly distributed switching architectures that enable parallel processing of calls and ensure a "non-blocking, non-contended" state where there is always a greater number of trunks (paths in/out of the system) than users as well as fault tolerance which ensures that any one component failure can not affect all users or lines. As processing power has increased and switching technologies have matured, voice trading systems are evolving from digital time-division multiplexing (TDM) system architectures to Internet Protocol (IP) server-based architectures. IP technologies have transformed communications for traders by enabling converged, multimedia communications that include, in addition to traditional voice calls, presence-based communications such as: unified communications and messaging,

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

(IM), chat and audio/

video conferencing Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video calling) is the use of audio signal, audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. ''Vide ...

. Some of modern trading turret models are optimised to integrate with PBX platform. By natively registering on CUCM, for example, office users and turret users can have tighter collaboration and reduce total cost of ownership. While some of trading turret systems also include

intercom An intercom, also called an intercommunication device, intercommunicator, or interphone, is a stand-alone voice communications system for use within a building, small collection of buildings or portably within a small coverage area, which funct ...

functions, it is common that financial services firms use an independent intercom system along with trading turret systems.

References

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External links

A Bankers Guide to Trading Turrets
Peter Redshaw, 12 September 2013. Gartner. Computer telephony integration Financial markets Share trading Telephone exchange equipment

Voice trading turrets

See also

References

External links