Adobe AIR Showcase

The NASDAQ Stock Market, Inc.

NASDAQ leverages Adobe Flex™ and Adobe® AIR™ to deliver a desktop application that enables investors and brokers to replay market activity in great detail at any given point in time.

Since its debut in 1971 as the world's first electronic stock market, NASDAQ has been at the forefront of innovation by using technology to bring millions of investors together with the world's leading companies.

The responsibility for developing products that can manage enormous amounts of trading data and deliver it to customers in relevant, interactive ways falls to the Market Data Product Development team at NASDAQ. According to Randall Hopkins, vice president at NASDAQ, all types of investors, traders and brokers will benefit from being able to replay what happened in the market at a certain point in time.

"When investors receive trade confirmations, they often don't know what happened between the time they placed their order and the moment their trade was executed," says Hopkins. "They want to know why the final price is different than the 'real-time' price they saw when they placed the order. It's really about understanding why they got a price and whether it was fair."

Checks and Balances

The NASDAQ product development team turned to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR to create NASDAQ Market Replay. The dynamic application gives users instant insight into extremely detailed trading activity in the market at any time during the day. For example, users can query when a stock trade happened and play forward and backward the market events as if they were watching the market in real time.

While the complexities of equity trading are enormous—with millions of orders continuously traveling many different paths to central markets, one thing remains constant: investors want to get the best price possible. Hopkins explains that the new Adobe AIR application will enable brokers to show their customers exactly what was going on in the market at the time a trade happened, helping them understand why they received a particular price.

Improving Productivity

To minimize bandwidth demands, the Adobe AIR application manages the data for the replays. "There's no doubt that working in Adobe AIR is a huge benefit with these large data sets." says Hopkins. "Once you have the trading data on your desktop, you control it and can view it in a variety of different ways." For example, a power user—such as a trader—responsible for watching a certain stock might set the Adobe AIR application to run overnight to assure that all the data he needs is ready instantly to replay the day's activity—without tying up an Internet connection during business hours.

According to Hopkins, NASDAQ Market Replay will help all sorts of market participants better understand and explain the market. For example, an analyst or journalist will be able to replay market events for viewers to help them understand significant price changes. "We are entering a world where people will be able to replay interesting market movements in simulated real time to experience the event exactly the way it originally happened." says Hopkins.

From a development perspective, NASDAQ leveraged existing web and network assets, while working in the familiar Adobe Flex framework.