TT acquires Trafix in 24/7 push, T+1 deadlines in the EU loom, and more

Last week, WatersTechnology hosted the annual Technology & Data in Financial Markets (TDFM) conference. And this week, Bloomberg hosted a major event in New York, while the annual Sibos gala was run down in Vice City (also known as Miami). That means many senior execs from major firms were giving their thoughts on tech and data. We have lots of those opinions in the links below.

Announced this week

Trading Technologies expands into equities, equities options with Trafix acquisition

Trading Technologies has acquired Trafix, a provider of equities and equity options order and execution management systems and FIX connectivity solutions. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

With an eye toward 24/7 trading, TT’s CEO, Justin Llewellyn-Jones told WatersTechnology that “there’s a lot of legacy software out there and a lot of fragmented systems; there are a lot of systems that were not designed to be global. They were not designed to be run 24/7, so there’s a lot of modernization work that has to happen right now.”

Walter Fitzgerald, chief executive officer and co-founder of Trafix, said the platform was designed “to be very modular, so that we could add functionality very quickly,” as markets evolved. For example, to make rapid changes, if a part of the system was upgraded, he said, Trafix could test the applicable module and not the whole system, which was a novel idea in 2014, when the vendor launched.

Bruce Markets to launch continuous weekend US equities trading

Pending regulatory review, Bruce Markets—the operator of Bruce ATS—is going to launch 24/7 US stock trading. Bruce Markets will leverage new strategic investments from PEAK6 Investments, the majority shareholder, and Robinhood Markets. Apex Fintech Solutions, Fidelity Investments, Nasdaq Ventures, NH Investment & Securities, Tastytrade, and Webull remain investors.

The broker-dealer will also expand its use of Nasdaq’s trading technology, while clearing, carrying, and custody services will be provided by Apex Clearing Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apex Fintech Solutions. Bruce Markets expects the new weekend session to launch in the coming months.

Nasdaq Calypso launches agentic capabilities

Nasdaq has created an agentic AI operating environment within its Nasdaq Calypso platform, providing financial institutions with a contained, governed space to run, connect, and scale AI agents across the trade lifecycle. The operating environment will allow clients to access Nasdaq Calypso’s agents and connect their own proprietary AI infrastructure through an integrated layer built on the Model Context Protocol.

The environment applies operational boundaries, live oversight, and strict sandboxing with no external data retention, designed to keep AI agents operating solely within an institution’s perimeter and policies. It will enable agents to operate on core Nasdaq Calypso data, drawing on the platform’s system-of-record trading, risk, and collateral records, and can be extended with additional enterprise, market, and reference data sources.

HSBC taps Nasdaq Calypso’s Derivatives Platform

Speaking of Nasdaq Calypso, HSBC will use the platform as its exchange-traded derivatives clearing platform. Since 2011, HSBC has used Nasdaq Calypso to clear clients’ OTC derivatives, including interest rate, inflation and credit default swaps. HSBC also uses Nasdaq Calypso for repo clearing and, by year-end, will extend its use to US Treasury cash transactions in preparation for mandatory clearing.

“Using Nasdaq Calypso on a multi-product basis is an enabler for cross-margining that enhances our clients’ ability to manage their collateral and market risk within the HSBC Real Clear product suite,” said Najib Lamhaouar, global head of OTC clearing and ETDs at HSBC, in the press release.

TXSE Group gains more investment

Texas Stock Exchange’s parent company, TXSE Group, has completed its third financing round, expanding its capital position to $430 million. Existing owners—including BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America—accounted for more than 75% of the fundraising round.

BMLL partners with Simudyne

BMLL, which provides historical Level 3, 2, and 1 data and analytics, is partnering with Simudyne, a generative AI and agent-based simulation platform designed to model and replicate market dynamics. The pairing will combine the former’s L2 and L3 harmonized historical order book datasets with the latter’s Pulse simulator, which allows users to run realistic, reactive market simulations, perform market replays, and test system performance.

Blue Fire AI closes $9m funding round

Blue Fire AI announced a strategic commercial agreement with Mizuho Financial Group and Asset Management One (AM-One) to build a leadership position in the next era of active management. The deal includes the development and distribution of institutional asset management products into Japan. As part of the collaboration, AM-One will take a minority equity stake in Blue Fire, closing its most recent funding round with $9 million in aggregate commitments.

“We are excited to leverage BFAI’s pioneering capabilities in AI-driven fundamental research to further enhance our investment capabilities,” said Noriyuki Sugihara, president and CEO of AM-One, in a statement. “We look forward to incorporating these advanced capabilities into our investment solutions and making them available to a broad range of clients through AM-One’s product platform.”

LSEG expands role on Canton Network

LSEG has been appointed as a super validator on the Canton Network. This expands LSEG’s existing role as a validator through the cash application of LSEG’s Digital Settlement House on Canton’s blockchain network.

What you might have missed from us

Goldman exec: Dec. 6 a ‘lighthouse’ for EU T+1 readiness

As the European Union moves towards T+1 clearing and settlement, brokers and clients have to improve allocations and confirmations in order to meet an 11 pm CET deadline on trade date from December 6, 2026, even though T+1 won’t officially kick in until 2027.

Goldman Sachs’ Sachin Mohindra had this to say as firms prepare to hit that deadline: “We do need checkpoints along the way [to serve as a] lighthouse in between your current position and your destination.”

Executives from JP Morgan, the European Central Bank, the National Securities Depository also gave their thoughts on T+1 preparedness.

Month-long power glitch hits key APAC trade surveillance tool

A power problem at Australia’s SYD1 datacenter on August 24 has left clients hosted in its on-premises environment with a prolonged period of impaired functionality on the Nasdaq Trade Surveillance application. The issue has since been fixed.

The issue in Australia comes hot on the heels of breakdowns in Nasdaq’s trade surveillance software, which failed to send alerts for some contracts, as a result of incorrect multipliers that were embedded in the tool. The error affected exchanges globally, from Cboe and Eurex to Brazil’s BM&F Bovespa and the National Stock Exchange of India.

If everyone can be an expert in everything, is anyone an expert in anything?

Eden Simmer, head of global equity trading at Pimco, had this to say at a WatersTechnology event last week: “The domain expertise that we spent our linear careers building, that’s what it’s breaking down. And so, for example, in trading you have a cash equity trader, you have an equity options trader, you have an equity swaps trader, an equity futures trader, an equity convertible bonds trader, and so on and so forth, and all of those things are going to converge or are converging.”

While AI has promised to democratize knowledge and skillsets, our Reb Natale wonders whether that’s entirely a good thing.

Buy-side firms warn semantic layers not a quick fix for AI integration

Semantic layers promise to teach AI what a firm’s data means. Keeping that meaning current is the part that may get overlooked, tech heads warn.

“You need to have life-cycle management of your metadata and semantic layer. If you don’t have that, you could have quick wins, but you would start [seeing the model] drifting in the wrong direction,” notes Pierre-Olivier Trabichet, head of AI, data, and innovation at Swiss investment manager Lombard Odier.

PostSig, CJC team up to run data management for London broker

PostSig, a San Francisco-based inventory and contract management provider, has partnered with data consultancy CJC to manage the market data spend of a London-based trading firm, under its first enterprise deployment.

“By year-end, we will have a solid budget, tight control over what data people at the firm are using, and will have more control over contracts for exchanges,” says Sara Baker, global head of commercial management at CJC.

Mind the stack: the foundation markets run on

Market data is a layered system with exchange data at its base, indexes and benchmarks in the middle, and alternative datasets above them. Jeff Kimsey of Nasdaq argues that only the exchange layer is truly “load-bearing”: it is the transparent, real‑time record of bids, offers and trades against which every other layer is measured.

Kimsey warns that as firms delegate more judgment to AI, these systems still depend on an external, trustworthy record. “What did you validate this against?” he asks, stressing that without clean, standardized exchange data “AI can just as confidently draw the wrong conclusions” at scale.

In other news

How DraftKings Uses A.I. to Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose, New York Times

There are plenty of people who believe that Donald Trump will destroy democracy in America. Or maybe it’s artificial intelligence that will do us in? And of course, there are wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and atrocities in Africa and…ahem…Armenia. Trump is not my cup of tea—to say the least—but I believe that the American people will speak their minds in the voting booths. I believe AI can be very dangerous, but I think we will come to our senses and find proper ways to govern it. It is a man-made tool and is incredibly helpful. And it’s a simple fact that wars will exist, in perpetuity, so I can only worry so much about that. Callous, but real.

I’m an optimist in humanity…though when I doomscroll, my own humanity shrinks. But one of my favorite books is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. There’s so much positive out there, but the news often reports the negative. (And yes, I’m part of the “news.”)

What does scare the ever-loving shit out of me is the proliferation of online gambling in the country. It’s a plague. It’s the new heroin epidemic, but I think it will be worse. Not through direct deaths, like heroin, but through the destruction of people’s finances, families, and the increase in suicide and alcohol and drug abuse, which also lead to death.

Think I’m crazy? Read that article about DraftKings, linked above. Or, read this article in The Atlantic by the great Mackay Coppins. And I think that prediction markets are simply the cherry on top of a rot that will help to destroy this country. And yes…we write about prediction markets, so perhaps I’m part of the problem.

These are just my opinions, but I do encourage you to read those two articles from The New York Times and The Atlantic.