At 2:32 p.m. on May 6, 2010, the U.S. Equity market began a sell-off that lasted 36 minutes and saw the Dow plunge over 1,000 points, or 10 percent of its total value. The event—which a report later described as “one of the most turbulent periods in the history of financial markets”—became known as the “Flash Crash,” and had reverberations that lasted for years. One of the most immediate impacts was the November 2010 implementation by the U.S. regulators of a rule for market access. It was intended to help prevent similar incidents by requiring any broker who provided direct market access to its trading clients to perform a pre-trade risk check. This would prevent any erroneous orders from entering the market and triggering another high-speed sell-off.

The new regulation required numerous risk checks to be performed in-line, which resulted in a substantial added delay in getting orders to the market using traditional computer models. Set against this backdrop, HPR (formerly known as Hyannis Port Research) is one of the pioneers that opened its doors to deliver capital markets infrastructure (CMI) technologies that would allow trading to continue without sacrificing speed.