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About:
Marketcetera Inc provides open source software for automated trading systems. With 10,000 software downloads and more than 20 production deployments, Marketcetera provides maximum flexibility and technology choice to financial services institutions of all sizes. Marketcetera’s platform lets brokers and traders build effective automated trading systems, develop proprietary algorithms, create order management solutions and manage risk faster, easier and at much lower cost than with closed platforms.

Whats hot about this start up?

- Industry’s first Open source Trading Platform. Total Market size is around $ 1 Billion US Dollars.
- Multiple potential revenue streams ( Services, Market Data, Brokerage(commissions per trade).
- Fast time to deploy
- Zero licensing cost to the customer as the software is Open source.

Founders: Co-Founded in 2006, by Stanford Computer Scientists, Graham Miller (CEO) and Toli Kuznets (CTO). Both founders have over 10 years experience managing trading platforms and strategies for wall street hedge funds.

Venture Capital: $4 million from Shasta Ventures

Potential Risks/Pitfalls:

Although the company claims that it actually helps drive down costs for hedge fund trading firms, Given the current market turmoil, it will be interesting to see how this company does.
Also, in addition to the product’s code being heavily open source itself, the code also leverages other open source apis such as QuickFIX. This introduces some element of risk for the company, for 2 reasons, a) It now has a heavy dependency on the quality and performance capabilities of the 3rd party open source libraries. If these apis degrade in quality or performance, Marketcetera can get adversely impacted. b) If the 3rd party APIs /Vendors cease to exist, it will need to react fast or develop its architecture such that its easy to operate in a plug and play model and is not tightly coupled to these providers