Industry Article - How to evolve a risk-based FPGA strategy into a value add strategy

Fixnetix is a leading managed service provider for the global financial community, with a team of highly skilled professionals tasked with developing and providing dynamic products and solutions to meet the ever changing requirements of the banking industry.

Dr Marcus Perrett, Director of Technology and Development, provides an insight into the use of FPGA technology in the finance industry.

How Fixnetix has evolved their risk-based FPGA strategy into a value add strategy 

The use of FPGAs in finance was originally driven by regulation. Brokers were encouraged (or mandated by regulation) to have controls in place to monitor and, if required, cancel or stop clients trading. As clients had traditionally enjoyed direct access to the market via a broker, a system that was positioned between a trading system and the exchange needed to be a fast as possible to reduce the impact to a client’s trading strategy. Hence, FPGA technology was employed to great effect in a number of configurations; some banks built their own systems and several vendors built their own.

Fixnetix has enjoyed success using that model in Canada, where regulation has driven the need for a low latency risk solution for latency sensitive clients trade flows via a broker.

However, regulation alone has not proven to be the only driving factor for the use of FPGA in the finance area. For example, in Japan, the native exchange (TSE) utilises a complex and verbose protocol called arrowhead. In addition, the rules around erroneous trades and protocol discipline are onerous and for potential new entrants into that market it can be a daunting task to overcome.

Several brokers have solved this issue by offering FIX to arrowhead translation services to allow easy and ubiquitous trading, the downside being that such systems are very slow due to the amount of processing required to perform the translation into arrowhead and even more so in generating FIX compliant messages in the return path; this requires Persistence (storage of incoming FIX tags for later use) and Enrichment (calculation of values not available in arrowhead message such as Average Price).

What did Fixnetix do?

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Altera Stratix® V GX/GS PCIe Board with Dual QSFP+

BittWare's S5-PCIe (S5PE) is a PCIe x8 card based on the high-bandwidth, power-efficient Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGA. 

For more information please contact Sarsen Technology on 01672 511166, or send us an email with your enquiry.

Low Latency Technology - Removing the Barriers with BittWare

Low latency is the hot topic in the financial trading marketplace. Companies have to react to market events faster than the competition to make money. The round trip between the event and the final trade is quite significant...

• Event occurs at the source venue
• Information about that event is placed in a message on the wire
• Message reaches the decision-making application
• Application makes a trade decision based upon that event
• Order is sent to the trading venue
• Venue executes the order
• Order confirmation is sent back to application

All in a matter of milliseconds....

In April 2012, Fixnetix, global managed services provider for trading, market data and risk control, announced they were the first fintech (financial technology) company in Europe to offer the Altera Stratix V FPGA on the BittWare PCI Express slot-cards. The company announced late November 2010 a real-time low latency filter, iX-eCute, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), to solve the eternal industry conundrum of pre-trade risk, compliance and ultra-low latency execution.

BittWare's PCI Express slot-cards are the hardware boards that iX-eCute operates on whilst Altera Stratix is the industry’s highest performance FPGA with over 1 TeraFLOPS of processing. iX-eCute firmware deployment relies on minimal delays, significantly reduced jitter, energy and thermal requirements whilst commanding maximum performance per watt. BittWare offers a PCIe-compliant deployable slot-card that works out of the box, with validation, verification, and control software in place.

The S5PE from BittWare is a PCIe x8 card based on the high-bandwidth, power-efficient Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGA. Features include -

• High density Altera Stratix V GX/GS
• PCIe x8 interface supporting Gen1, Gen2, or Gen3
• 2 QSFP+ cages allows dual 40GigE or 8 10GigE interfaces direct to the FPGA for lowest possible latency
• Up to 16 GB of DDR3 SDRAM with optional ECC
• Utility I/O includes: USB 2.0, RS-232, and JTAG

iX-eCute on the BittWare board with Altera Stratix processing is available for purchase through Fixnetix.