A trading turret or dealer board is a specialized telephony key system that is generally used by financial traders on their trading desks. Trading has progressed from floor trading through phone trading to electronic trading 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 platforms, some phone trading persists and trading turrets are common on trading desks of

investment banks Investment banking pertains to certain activities of a financial services company or a corporate division that consist in advisory-based financial transactions on behalf of individuals, corporations, and governments. Traditionally associated with ...

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 In telephony, ringdown is a method of signaling an operator in which telephone ringing current is sent over the line to operate a lamp or cause the operation of a self-locking relay known as a ''drop''. Ringdown is used in manual operation, an ...

circuits). In addition, many traders have dozens or hundreds of dedicated speed dial buttons and large distribution

hoot-n-holler A hoot-n-holler (also known as a squawk box system, holler down, shout down or junkyard circuit, and abbreviated as 'hoot' or 'shout') is a type of telecommunications system where there is a permanent open circuit between two or more parties. Any ...

Squawk box ''Squawk Box'' is an American business news television program that airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern time on CNBC. The program is co-hosted by Joe Kernen, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Since debuting in 1995, the show has spawned a number ...

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,

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 prin ...

foreign exchange The foreign exchange market (Forex, FX, or currency market) is a global decentralized or over-the-counter (OTC) market for the trading of currencies. This market determines foreign exchange rates for every currency. It includes all as ...

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

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

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 Time-division multiplexing (TDM) is a method of transmitting and receiving independent signals over a common signal path by means of synchronized switches at each end of the transmission line so that each signal appears on the line only a fracti ...

(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 online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

(IM), chat and audio/ video conferencing. 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 or small collection of buildings which functions independently of the public telephon ...

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