When securities prices move, trading firms can make more money the faster they react. High-frequency securities trading is now the norm and financial services firms are incentivized to maximize the performance of their high-frequency trading infrastructure. Performance plays a critical role in each basic step of high-frequency securities trading, including obtaining market information, processing the information through prediction algorithms, and executing trades based on the information – all transaction-intensive. Fine-tuning the prediction algorithms based on how they perform is a related, analytics-intensive task.
To achieve optimal performance, firms are implementing a variety of technologies and strategies, often in combination. For example:
- Dark fiber cabling is an optical-fiber infrastructure that directly connects the decision engine to the backbone of the exchange
- Exchange co-location puts the trading computer with the decision engine in the same data center as the matching engine
- Hardware-based programming logic puts the decision logic onto hardware via FPGAs and GPUs
- Hadoop with MapReduce facilitates rapid data transfer among nodes and divides applications into numerous small blocks that can be run on any node
- Complex event processing (CEP) processes multiple streams of data at the same time
- Parallel processing clusters distribute processing across multiple nodes in a cluster
In-Memory Computing for High-Frequency Trading
One of the most powerful technologies for high-frequency trading is in-memory computing. More affordable than ever before, in-memory computing keeps data in memory instead of on disk to provide massive improvements in performance and scalability to handle massive data sets. In-memory computing solutions operate thousands of times faster than traditional disk-based platforms and can easily be scaled by adding new nodes to the distributed computing cluster.
High Frequency Trading with In-Memory Computing White Paper
If your organization is developing or trying to improve a high-frequency trading infrastructure, please download Driving High-Frequency Trading with In-Memory Computing, a new GridGain white paper that takes a detailed look at the current state of high-frequency trading and reveals more specifically how in-memory computing can help financial services firms meet this technology challenge.
As always, if you have questions or comments, please let us know!