Overview of FIX Protocol for Financial Applications video
Time is Money: Managing the Performance of Financial Trading Applications whitepaper
FIX Protocol Application Performance Management with NetQoS Trade Monitor
Financial trading activity between exchanges, brokerage firms, hedge funds, and other financial services companies is a core component of the world economy. With trillions of dollars traded annually on the NASDAQ alone, financial service entities are investing heavily in optimizing electronic trading and employing direct market access (DMA) to increase their speed to financial markets and reduce latency where possible. Put simply, a one millisecond advantage can be worth millions. In addition, regulatory initiatives like the Regulation National Market System (RegNMS) in the US and the UK’s Markets in Financial Instruments Direction (MiFID) are also forcing trading services to provide order execution and market data in a timely manner.
For the trade desk, managing the delivery of trading applications and keeping latency low increasingly requires an understanding of the FIX protocol. However, many trade desks are not equipped with the right solutions to monitor and troubleshoot FIX applications.
NetQoS Trade Monitor is a response time monitoring product that captures and analyzes FIX protocol financial transactions to help trade desk personnel measure latency, speed troubleshooting, and reconstruct trade executions. With Trade Monitor, you can baseline trading performance to understand what “normal” performance and mitigate market risk by identifying slow sessions, servers and/or firms. Trade Monitor is a passive appliance designed to be secure and non-intrusive in your trading network environment.
Quickly understand latency and trade volume across all sessions.
Drill into specific sessions to see order latency over time.
How does NetQoS Trade Monitor Help You?
1. Reduce Exposure to Market Risk
- Real-time alerting of application and network incidents that affect individual transactions or the trading environment as a whole (such as an unacknowledged order)
- Intelligent, dynamic performance baselines to understand where latency problems exist for sessions, servers and firms
- Fast trade reconstruction to quickly ascertain the disposition of any trade
2. Understand Latency Outliers
- FIX response time latency metrics across multiple sessions to determine best/worst connections
- Latency reports with roles-based access that can be organized by FIX server, firm or session to provide the right information to the right person
- Real-time processing of actual FIX traffic to flag delay and retransmissions with the ability to filter the related packets for further investigation
3. Resolve Trade Problems Quickly with Packet Capture and Retrospective Analysis
- Advanced search capabilities and real-time indexing allow multiple FIX sessions searches simultaneously using any FIX tag or tag value
- Granular visibility of transactions and order chain reconstruction
- Packet captures that can be exported and viewed in any packed decode application such as NetQoS Observer or WireShark
Features
Passive Monitoring Architecture
- Non-invasively records all FIX transactional and related traffic for analysis and retrieval
- Searches and off-loads captured traffic for deep packet analysis
Response Time Latency Metrics
- Calculate response times for individual FIX transactions in micro-second
- Determine which FIX sessions, servers or firms are experiencing high latency or abnormal behavior
- Calculate Response time percentile aggregations for FIX sessions, servers and firms
- Calculate latency baselines for alerting and analysis
Rapid Trade Reconstruction Capabilities
- Allow for fast troubleshooting of an order to quickly ascertain the disposition of an order
- View FIX messages in sequential or “bounce diagram” formats
Decodes FIX Protocol Messages Into Human-Readable Format
- Allows non-FIX specialist to troubleshoot FIX messages and errors
- Prevents needless escalation of issues to “expensive” personnel
Alerting Capabilities For Proactive Management of the Trading Infrastructure
- SNMP traps for FIX application and network conditions or errors
- SNMP traps for degradation of latency from normal
