Interesting bits from an article on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in today’s WSJ by James Areddy:

Handling volume isn’t a problem at the Shanghai exchange. Its current system is robust enough to handle 16,000 trades a second. That is even more than the 13,000 the New York Stock Exchange says its systems can handle over a sustained period, even after a more than tripling of capacity in the past three years. With the Shanghai Composite Index down 42% from its high of 2237.49 in June 2001 and amid a halt in initial public offerings while China works through overhauls on its nontradable, government-owned shares, the exchange easily handled last year’s average daily transaction value of $257 million. Trading value in Shanghai was down 35% last year but remained about 1.5 times more than the country’s other exchange in Shenzhen.

In addition to a new system to handle trades, the exchange has also built one of the world’s biggest electronic vaults of trading information. In December, NCR Corp’s Teradata division finished a project called a data-storage “warehouse.” Packed with 14 terabites (one terabite is 1,000 gigabites) of capacity and every single trade ever done in Shanghai, the database gives the exchange capacity to run high-level simulations of how a new product might impact trading.

14 terabites (and counting)… Cool. (But right now I don’t think the Shanghai Stock Exchange does 16,000 trades a day let alone a second.)