Trading markets continue to evolve, and for most organisations, this means more active high-frequency trading. Within energy, this is driven by a move both towards algo trading, plus increased trading around assets. These trends drive increasing volumes in day-ahead and within-day markets, and in turn increases the amount of data an organisation has to process.

TradeCube from CTRM Cubed keeps pace with these markets with the inclusion of a series of automation components to reduce the manual workload.

From an ETRM perspective, automation can be in two forms – “push” for event driven activities, and “pull” for on-request activities.

Generally, push is better than pull; it’s more immediate and efficient; but it is harder to get working, more so when dealing with external systems.

Pull, sometimes known as “polling”, is simpler but suffers from two main problems: there’s a lot of wasted requests where there is no new data to pull; secondly, if you poll less frequently, then you are potentially delayed in getting updated data between each poll cycle.