Low-latency Electronic Trading

Images of large stock-exchange trading floors packed with day traders franticly trying to get their orders processed as they watch green and red lights running on LED boards no longer represent the reality of financial markets.

According to the paper Asset Risk Modeling: Techniques for a Global Economy in an Electronic and Algorithmic Trading Era, up to 85% of immediate trading decisions are made by machine-based algorithms.

In this world, a microsecond can mean the difference between a successfully processed order and a missed opportunity for profit. And the race for the fastest algorithmic trading platform has only just begun.

Algorithmic Trading: Percentage of Market Volume

In algorithmic and HFT trading, a good strategy is only half of the solution. The strategy needs a platform that can execute it. Software platforms offer flexibility at the cost of latency and jitter. High latency with jitter means missed opportunities and possible losses. Hardware platforms offer high performance and superior latency, but it is challenging to implement and readjust the strategy once the hardware platform has been deployed. Needless to say, it is undesirable to reveal one’s strategy to a third party, whose help is often required when programming the hardware.

There is a way to achieve both ease of implementation of the strategy and low, deterministic latency: embedding the strategy in an FPGA network card. A shining example of this approach is Tradecope. Tradecope implements the full tick-to-trade pipeline in an FPGA and allows implementing the trading strategy in the C++ language. This means that any software engineer can embed the strategy without the necessity of disclosing it to a third party. Tradecope’s FPGA-based hardware platform leverages deterministic latency below 1 μs. It is a complex bundle of hardware, firmware and software perfectly suited for any algorithmic or HFT strategy.

Tradecope Offers:

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  • Trading strategy in FPGA

  • Sub-microsecond latency

  • Parallel feed handlers for two exchanges

  • Full tick-to-trade pipeline in FPGA

Netcope Success Stories

U.S. trading firm deploys Tradecope

U.S. trading firm deploys Tradecope Electronic Stock Trading

For successful trading on electronic exchanges today, it is not enough to come up with the smartest strategy anymore. Learn more about how U.S trading firm deployed FPGA-based Tradecope solution to increase hit rate of the trading strategy.