In layman’s terms, it’s the use of very powerful computers programmed with sophisticated instructions to trade stocks and make profits from minute price variations that occur in less than a second.
Simples!
High Speed Financial Trading, or High Frequency Trading (HFT) doesn’t actually have anything to do with ‘investing’ as we know it, it’s simply a set of computing instructions that react to information much faster than any human can. These trades can make significantly less than 1p per share, but if you add up the millions of trades per day you’re looking at a respectable chunk of money!
‘Pretty complex stuff’, I hear you say...
Fortunately BittWare has designed and developed a growing family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware which makes it easier for customers to create system solutions for financial acceleration.
The challenges in this space are quite unique:
- Require ultra-low latency feed handling
- Faster analysis/data correlation
- Maximum performance/watt (minimize energy and thermal requirements)
- Desire for scalable architecture to enable “FPGA Farm” implementation
‘Low-Latency’ is the real buzz word for HFT, with the solution offering the lowest latency being the most attractive to prospective customers.
The BittWare S5-PCIe-HQ half-length PCIe board, which features the Altera Stratix V FPGA, provides systems developers with a high level of system integration, and high-performance network processing, signal processing, and data acquisition possibilities.
For more information get in touch with the Sarsen team on +44 1672 511166, or email us – info@sarsen.net
