Gartner defines a trading platform as a computer system designed to perform financial market analysis, capture and process daily treasury transactions, evaluate the risks associated with those transactions, provide settlement and reporting functionality, and post transaction records to accounts and other financial records repositories. Trading platforms directly or indirectly facilitate the placement of orders for financial products with another financial entity or intermediary over a network. These financial offerings include products and asset classes such as equities, bonds/fixed income instruments, foreign exchange, money market/cash instruments, commodities and derivatives. The financial entities involved in the transactions include brokers, market makers/principals, investment banks, universal banks, hedge funds and asset managers. Trading platforms facilitate electronic/digital transactions that may be undertaken by trading firms from any location using available computer networking infrastructure.