14th December 2011
You know what it’s like when you’re trying to drive in the fog and you don’t have a clear view ahead. The car in front’s fog light is a welcome signal, a reference point that you can see where you’re going.
Similarly, when I speak with operations teams, they tell me how important it is that they are able to see where they’re going in delivering the optimum trading environment for their firm.
What they’re looking for is a complete real-time overview of activity across their trading engines and order management systems, delivering reporting on transaction status and associated market exposure at any point in the trading day, and reducing their risk by watching for the correct working of execution venues and the appropriate volume of client order transactions.
I was recently speaking with one of our clients, a bank that wanted to gain a consolidated view of all FIX client connectivity and trading activity across an array of global FIX engines to multiple exchanges and brokers.
They previously had a Web-based GUI shipped with their vendor’s FIX engine which they used to understand the health of their FIX engines and client connectivity as well as to query FIX orders/messages. They were already using Geneos to manage their FIX infrastructure and applications.
Now, by utilising the Geneos FIX Analyser plug-in, they are able to gain the fully consolidated view they need of all their global FIX engines and client connectivity within the same tool used to manage their trading infrastructure and applications. It allows them to operate a more efficient and productive support desk, which in turn provides a higher level of service to their business users.
FIX Analyser has helped them see more clearly. So how does it achieve this?
FIX Analyser plug-in within Geneos enables our clients’ operations, sales and trading staff to track business activity in real time and gain a clear picture that prompts necessary corrective action to solve any performance issues.
It analyses Financial Information eXchange (FIX) messages, incoming order flow from clients and outgoing transactions to trading engines and exchanges to provide business intelligence on the status of orders throughout the trade lifecycle, from incoming client orders through to execution, as well as providing necessary detail on round-trip latency for orders, cancels and rejects and individual fills.
Our clients use Geneos to create rules on the data provided by FIX Analyser. These rules can query historical metrics and generate alerts where any defined threshold is breached. A server, say, could be experiencing performance issues that cause an increase in order latency being processed through the server. That can adversely affect volumes traded by institutions, so proactive monitoring is important to spot and correct a problem before it impacts traders.
When an ability to see trouble round the corner is a critical requirement, the Geneos FIX Analyser plug-in gives operations teams the clarity they need of what is happening across the FIX message flows they are supporting, as well as providing business users with a complete view of their trading environment.
It’s the difference between being able to clearly see where you’re going and taking the necessary decisions to safely negotiate your surrounding environment - and driving blind.
Quintin Gomez
CTO of ITRS Group
www.itrsgroup.com
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