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Content about White Papers

May 16, 2012
A Flexible Approach to Market Infrastructure

The growing speed and complexity of today’s financial markets are placing all but the most technologically well-resourced participants at a strategic disadvantage. Buy- and sell-side firms, the execution venues they use, and the wide range of post-trade, market data and other service providers whose offerings they consume, are all struggling to keep up with the pace of change throughout the lifecycle of the financial transaction.

Everywhere in this lifecycle, technology is giving those willing to invest in it a competitive edge. In the pre-trade area, the growth of high frequency trading has emphasised the need for low-latency connectivity for both market and order data. Firms of all sizes are making use of collocation and proximity hosting services, in order to ensure their execution engines are as close as physically possible to the execution venues they trade on. Those wishing to compete on speed will fail unless they make the required investment in technology; for them, being second is not an option.

April 13, 2012
High Frequency Trading Beats the Heat with Total Liquid Submersion Cooling

This white paper was written by Hardcore Computer.

A millisecond delay can mean the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for algorithmic traders engaged in high frequency trading (HFT) in today's financial markets. To gain that valuable competitive edge, financial institutions require high-performance computing solutions that are fast, reliable and offer low latency.

But performance demands are pushing the physical boundaries of conventional computing equipment – from the desktop and workstation to the server. While today's processors are faster and better, they still are negatively impacted by the heat generated when overclocked, and how to cool equipment is still a fundamental challenge.

Read how Hardcore Computer and its patented total liquid submersion cooling technology is facing the challenge head on. As the first company to use this unique cooling method, Hardcore Computer is helping the financial services industry achieve significant improvements in computing speed, performance, reliability and latency minimization, while reducing cooling and power costs and lessening environmental impact.

February 6, 2012
High Performance Trading - FIX Messaging Testing

This white paper was written by OnX Enterprise Solutions, and others.

It reports on the activity of a consortium of leading IT vendors that have joined forces to create demonstrable high performance solution stacks to address common business requirements in financial trading. The initial focus of the consortium is on a reference-able technology stack of products and services to support FIX protocol communication functions.

The paper describes the test environment, documents a set of benchmark tests performed on both commercial and open source FIX engine offerings, and details and interprets the representative latency and throughput figures achieved.

December 15, 2011
Rewriting the Rules for Financial Trading Infrastructure

Equinix Whitepaper 12 11This white paper was written by Equinix.

The revolution of distributed trading and its applicability to all market participants is re-writing the rulebooks for trading infrastructure, enhancing agility and efficiency for both high and low frequency traders.

By understanding the competitive advantages of the new rules of Machine to Machine (M2M) 2.0, investment firms can trade smarter inside global multi-tenanted data centers to maximize trading performance, remove connection latency and drive profit from emerging global opportunities.

November 1, 2011
Optimizing Infrastructure for Trading Performance

Automated trading in the financial markets continues to grow, as it is adopted beyond equities into other asset classes, and as its use expands globally.

While some classes of automated trading – such as High Frequency Trading, Arbitrage and Market Making – continue to require a continued focus on reducing latency, from milliseconds to microseconds to nanoseconds, much of the marketplace is not as latency sensitive.

June 13, 2011
Architectures for Extreme Low Latency

In recent years, a combination of regulatory reforms, market structure evolution and technology innovation have combined to create a new paradigm for the global financial trading markets; one in which the speed at which transactions can be executed is fundamental to the success of market participants.

Put simply, for such a participant – be it an exchange operator, a broker or a trading firm – to win in the new electronic marketplace of complex algorithmic and high-frequency trading (HFT), they have to be faster than their competition. And the margin that separates the winners from the also rans is now measured in microseconds, with nanoseconds not too far off.

June 13, 2011
Demystifying Exchange Colocation

Colocation has established itself as the access mechanism for trading firms requiring the fastest possible execution. It’s widely accepted that for firms wanting the lowest latency access to a specific market there is no substitute for placing their trading applications as close as possible to the matching engines themselves, making it the solution of choice for all but those focusing on multi-venue multi-location arbitrage.

But the perception to date has been – and justifiably so – that exchange colocation is a premium service reserved for the larger institutions. For many smaller and remote practitioners – hedge funds and prop traders who lack the IT resource normally associated with colocation – cost is a prohibitive factor in their decision whether to colocate.

May 9, 2011
Optimising Value from High Performance Connectivity

High frequency trading (HFT) is now a term recognised by the mainstream. This wide familiarity has coincided with maturity of HFT practices, the explosion in their use, and a flattening out of the potential returns as competition increases.

Early adopters of HFT were able to leverage high-performance technologies to generate vast returns. Today, the environment is tougher, and technology investments are coming under more scrutiny than before, even in the high-performance trading space. Low-latency infrastructure architects are now taking a more strategic approach to connectivity, in order to yield higher performance, both in terms of trading profits and broader functionality benefits.

April 18, 2011
Informatica, HP and Mellanox Benchmark Report

Mellanox Whitepaper 04 11 This white paper was written by Informatica, HP, and Mellanox Technologies.

The securities trading market is experiencing rapid growth in volume and complexity with a greater reliance on trading software, which is supported by sophisticated algorithms. As this market grows, so do the trading volumes, bringing existing IT infrastructure systems to their limits.

January 28, 2010
Trading Beyond the Horizon: Fragmentation Drives Multi-Market Execution

In 2010, financial markets participants will continue to expand their trading activities as liquidity increasingly becomes fragmented, seeking alpha in new markets, best execution in dark pools, arbitrage opportunities across the order book and by implementing high frequency and complex, multi-leg, cross asset class strategies.

The successful operations – whether they be the proprietary desks of traditional broker/dealers, specialist high frequency and algorithmic traders, or quantitative hedge funds – will leverage a trading infrastructure that combines high performance analytical, algorithmic and order routing platforms with the lowest latency access to multiple, geographically dispersed execution venues.

November 18, 2009
Cinnober: Lowering Door-to-Door Latency to 25 Microseconds within 18 months

This white paper was written by Cinnober.

Today speed is crucial to any trading venue that wants to stay competitive. At the same time, with high-frequency trading gaining an increasing share of overall volumes, the ability to manage rising transaction volumes is also a necessity.

In 2007, Cinnober published a white paper which established some best practices for measuring latency in financial markets, and publishing the results in a clear and understandable fashion. Cinnober also disclosed benchmark figures of its own trading platform with a level of transparency seen neither before nor since, showing that the context of the testing environment is of the utmost importance. Since that paper was published, latency has become a widely-used metric.

February 12, 2009
Sun Microsystems - Building A Low Latency Infrastructure For Electronic Trading

This white paper was written by Sun Microsystems.

Authored with input from A-Team Group, it examines the hotspots within an electronic trading environment and considers routes and technologies that might contribute to reducing or even eliminating latency.

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