Whilst not all asset classes and workflows need to be ultra-low latency, there is no doubt that performance and performance measurement have grown in importance as electronic trading has become increasingly pervasive. This is driven by both the competitiveness of the industry and the regulatory focus on issues such as best execution.

But performance is about more than just pure speed – headline latency numbers become meaningless if that performance cannot be maintained during critical periods. Jitter and garbage collection (GC) can see latency deteriorate during busy market conditions or result in major spikes, blowing out average latency and making expected performance (benchmarked in sanitised test environments) look misleading at best. The other major determinant of performance is throughput and whether a chosen solution has the ability to scale to meet message rates during unexpected volume peaks or highly volatile market conditions.

The RA FIX Engine is built using Rapid Addition’s proprietary GC and jitter free software. It is optimised to eradicate outliers, ensuring both industry leading latency as well as stable and predictable performance. At the same time, our software, together with advanced multi-threading technology, enables industry leading message throughput and session numbers on a single commodity server. Scalability is one of the key reasons why our software is used by major sell-side firms and liquidity venues.

With five current versions of FIX in common use, not to mention the many extensions and customised implementations, sometimes FIX can feel less of a ‘standard’ than it is made out to be. FIX has bought huge benefits and efficiencies to the industry and has been a key facilitator in the growth of electronic trading, but it is also fair to say that every implementation will have its fair share of complexities.

Any FIX software solution chosen by your firm needs to be flexible enough to adapt to not only your own choice of FIX or custom dialect (to meet specific workflow needs), but often that of your clients or counterparties as well. It is essential that the solution can easily handle any variant of FIX and is quick to configure and adapt, reducing time to market and minimising any potential impact on important client relationships. This will also depend on whether your chosen vendor or in-house team can rapidly provide the support needed to implement required changes, or whether limited resource availability results in frustrating delays to change management and issue resolution.

Supporting all versions of FIX protocol out-of-the-box and providing extensible functionality, the RA FIX Engine can adapt to meet both your current and future business needs. Changes can be quickly implemented by either your inhouse developers or Rapid Addition can provide the professional services support needed to keep your business agile.

Even a single outage within an electronic trading environment can damage hard won customer relationships and impact the bottom line. FIX technology is core infrastructure that essentially underpins your business with clients and counterparties. The losses incurred by a client impacting outage can make the cost of a FIX engine look insignificant, which is why we believe that low cost solutions can be a false economy.

FIX is a core part of your trading infrastructure that just has to work!

Rapid Addition’s core FIX technology has been built on years of experience, longstanding collaboration with FIX Protocol Limited, and the provision of comprehensive electronic trading solutions to some of the biggest names in capital markets. Our technology has performed flawlessly in the face of extreme market volatility, supporting highly liquid asset classes at tier-1 banks. Even if your use case is far simpler, the RA FIX Engine provides you with the peace of mind that your business is being conducted on some of the most reliable technology in our industry.

As discussed previously, FIX infrastructure sits at the heart of trading workflow and is a business-critical component, yet we constantly hear horror stories from customers about the time it takes for their vendor or internal development team to implement changes or identify and respond to service issues. This can be an even bigger problem for firms who have gone down the route of open source software and used consultants or contractors to build and implement their solution. It is important to know what level of product support is provided by your vendor and their SLA targets for responsiveness, as slow response can reflect directly on your client relationships. You must also understand the boundary between support and professional services, i.e. when does support become chargeable, and therefore what is the real cost of ownership of a solution that ostensibly looks low cost when only considering the sticker price. Ultimately you need to know whether you will get support when you really need it and how much it will cost you.

At Rapid Addition we understand the importance of high availability, both with our software design and our customer support. Our senior developers have worked in sell-side trading teams and fully understand the importance of responsiveness. We are transparent about what is included in our support model but have the capacity to provide valueadded professional service resource where needed.

Whatever your use case, it will represent an important cog in your business operations. You need to be confident that your chosen solution has been designed specifically to support electronic trading workflow, that it is constantly being updated and enhanced (including timely addition of new versions of FIX), and it has been benchmarked in multiple use cases within credible financial organisations. FIX vendors who charge subscription fees for their solution are under constant scrutiny from their customers and have to demonstrate their value on a daily basis.

Rapid Addition’s technology is designed specifically for electronic trading, with input from leading global financial institutions. Our FIX Engine is used as a core technology at multiple major sell-side brokers, asset managers and liquidity platforms around the globe across a wide spectrum of workflows. Electronic trading technology innovation is