Electronic trading platform is a computer system that can be used to place orders for financial products over a network with a financial intermediary. This includes products such as shares, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives with a financial intermediary, such as a brokers, market makers, Investment banks or stock exchanges. Such platforms allow electronic trading to be carried out by users from any location and are in contrast to traditional floor trading using open outcry and telephone based trading.The first electronic trading platforms were typically associated with stock exchanges and allowed brokers to place orders remotely using private dedicated networks and dumb terminals. Early systems would not always provide live streaming prices and instead allowed brokers or clients to place an order which would be confirmed some time later, these were known as 'request for quote' based systems.Trading systems evolved to allow for live streaming prices and near instant execution of orders as well as using the internet as the underlying network meaning that location became much less relevant. Some electronic trading platforms have built in scripting tools and even APIs allowing traders to develop automatic or algorithmic trading systems and robots, which have been used by high frequency traders.The client graphical user interface of the electronic trading platforms can be used to trade currencies, equities, future, or options and are also sometimes called trading turrets.