A trading turret is a specialised telephony key system, also known as a Dealer Board, that is generally used by financial traders in conjunction with other tools that make up their Electronic trading platform.
Commonly those Traders who trade via voice use a highly specialized telephony key system, some examples of these are the Siemens OpenScape XPERT Touch Screen, First True IP solution SIEMENSTRADING/[1]there are others IPC IQ/max[1] and Orange Trading Solutions Mach 3D turret [2], BT ITS/Netrix, Mitel/Wesley Clover Solutions 5560 IP Turret Speakerbus i turret [3] [4]. Unlike typical phone systems, voice trading 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 ring down circuits). In addition, many traders have dozens or hundreds of dedicated speed dial buttons and large distribution hoot-n-holler 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, foreign exchange) or in some cases globally across whole trading organizations.
Unlike standard Private Branch Exchange 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 (TDM) system architectures to Internet Protocol (IP) server-based architectures. IP technologies are transforming the communications experience for traders by enabling converged, multimedia communications continuum that includes, in addition to traditional voice calls, presence-based communications that include: unified communications and messaging, instant messaging (IM), chat and audio/video conferencing. Trading communications is evolving from a strictly voice communications silo to an integrated communications experience that is extensible to mobile devices. They may also be integrated with other enterprise productivity applications that may include: customer relationship management (CRM) software, rich collaboration tools, corporate directory resources and various trade processing applications such as order management systems (OMS). The overarching objective is to enable trading floor staff to become more productive by optimizing the communications experience.