Category Archives: Ultra Messaging
Sub-100 Nanosecond Pub/Sub Messaging: What Does It Matter?
Our announcement last week was an exciting milestone for those of us who started at 29West supporting the early high-frequency traders from 2004 to 2006. Last week, we announced the next step in a 10 year effort that has now seen us set the bar for low latency messaging lower by six orders of magnitude in Version 6.1 of Informatica Ultra Messaging with Shared Memory Acceleration (SMX). The really cool thing is that we have helped early customers like Intercontinental Exchange and Credit Suisse take advantage of the reductions from 2.5 million nanoseconds (ns) of latency to now as low as 37 ns on commodity hardware and networks without having to switch products or do major rewrites of their code.
But as I said in the title, what does it matter? Does being able to send messages to multiple receivers within a single box trading system or order matching engine in 90 ns as opposed to one microsecond really make a difference?
Well, according to a recent article by Scott Appleby on the TabbFORUM, “The Death of Alpha on Wall Street”* the only way for investment banks to find alpha or excess returns is “to find valuation correlations among markets to extract microstructure alpha”. He states “Getco, Tradebot and Renaissance use technology to find valuation correlations among markets to extract microstructure alpha; this still works, but requires significant capital.” What that extra hundreds of nanoseconds that SMX frees up allows a company to do is to make their matching algorithms or order routers that much smarter by doing dozens of additional complex calculations before the computer makes a decision. Furthermore, by allowing busy software developers to let the messaging layer takeover integrating software components that may be less critical to producing alpha (but very important for operational risk control like guaranteeing that messages can be captured off the single box trading system for compliance and disaster recovery) they can focus on changes in the microstructure of the markets.
The key SMX innovation is another “less is more” style engineering feat from our team. Basically SMX eliminates any copying of messages from the message delivery path. And of course if the processes in your trading system happened to be running within the same CPU on the same or different cores, this means messages are being sent within the memory cache of the core or CPU. The other reason this matters is that because this product uniquely (as far as I know) allows zero copy shared memory communication between Java, C, and Microsoft .Net applications, developers can fully leverage the best features and the knowledge of their teams to deploy complex high-performance applications. For example, this allows third-party feed handlers built in C to communicate at extremely low latencies with algo engines written in Java.
So congrats to the UM development team for achieving this important milestone and “thanks” to our customers for continuing to push us to provide you with that “lagniappe” of extra time that can make all the difference in the success of your trading strategies and your businesses.
Messaging Challenges Over The WAN
Originally posted on low-latency.com
Many global companies, especially in the front office of capital markets, have a strategic need to send real-time data from one location to another, often thousands of miles away, over a Wide Area Network (or WAN) connection.
With foreign exchange, for example, global investment banks send dealable streaming prices, orders, trades, and reference data across the WAN. (more…)
Evolution: The General Store to the Individualized Shopper
The retail industry has seen a major transformation since its evolution. Tracing back to the 18th century where the concept of retail was limited to a “general store” the industry has now grown to the concept of the “individualized shopper.” Initially, the power lay with the merchants, then it was shifted to “brands” and then to “big-box chain stores.” Today the power has shifted squarely to the consumer. This new consumer is empowered – primarily through online and social channels – with nearly limitless options on their path to purchase. The industry is beginning to recognize that the experience they offer, whether in store or online, must be centered on this new consumer reality. (more…)
Informatica Ultra Messaging: Great Performance . . . At Lower Cost?
Printed words are good, but pictures and sound are better. Watch the video below for a quick summation of how Informatica Ultra Messaging can help your business:
- Increase application performance and throughput
- Reduce fixed and operational costs
- Increase capacity
- Reduce single points of failure
- Increase scalability, reliability, and availability
For more information, have a look at: Ultra Messaging, Better Value with Better Technology.
Capital Markets and Ultra Messaging
Pete Benesh discusses some of the major business challenges driving IT investment in capital markets today. He also highlights how Informatica Ultra Messaging can help organizations tackle these challenges.
More Trading Firms Using a “Trade Smarter, Not Harder” Strategy
There are lots of ways to run a trading firm.
Some firms use a strategy centered around high frequency or algorithmic trading, which are similar in that having the best technology and writing the fastest trading applications is essential.
At the other end of the spectrum, some firms employ only human traders, using a traditional buy-and-hold strategy, expecting to hold the security for months or even years before moving it.
But in between these two ends of the spectrum, there exists a hybrid that uses electronic trading with a bit of buy-and-hold added in. Some call this blend “trade smarter, not harder”.
Instead of competing with other traders to get the absolute lowest price, this strategy prioritizes on making better decisions by doing “pre-trade analytics” on historical and financial data.
Electronic Trading Systems Moving to the Cloud
More and more business applications are moving from the desktop to the cloud, and electronic trading applications are no different.
Over the last five or ten years, application vendors have established several advantages of running major applications, even mission-critical applications like salesforce.com, over the cloud.
These advantages include:
- Easier and smoother upgrades, which provides much better adaptability and agility in the face of changing market and business conditions, plus a better user experience,
- Better scalability, with newer technology advances, and
- Better portability across a wide array of device types, including smartphones and tablets (especially in the last 2-3 years).
Recent improvements in Web technology, such as HTML5 WebSockets, are helping to speed this transition along by providing several throughput and latency advantages over earlier iterations of Web technology, and even over native Windows applications. Now, application architects can freely choose the technology that provides a better path for growth, agility, and scalability, which is often a Cloud-based solution.
As I write this, a few of our customers who provide electronic trading solutions to their clients are making the strategic move to develop a next generation application based in the Cloud. The main driver for one customer was to be able to take on more clients more quickly and therefore grow the business faster by increasing marginal revenue and profitability. They found that the list of challenges with a thick desktop client to be just too big for growing the business as quickly as they wanted to — or needed to.
Messaging middleware, especially peer-to-peer solutions such as Informatica Ultra Messaging, can be a very important piece of a Cloud-based application. The peer-to-peer “nothing in the middle” model provides applications not just ultra-high performance (whether for high throughput or low latency), but also near-linear scalability, true 24×7 reliability and availability, and business and IT agility. These qualities tie directly to the advantages listed above.
Cloud-based applications, of course, must also contend with the Internet and all that comes with that: support for various browsers and platforms (and versions of each), scalability and bandwidth issues, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. New web technologies like HTML5 WebSockets from Kaazing are best positioned to take care of the path from server to the smartphone or tablet, and with JMS connectivity to Ultra Messaging on the back end, can provide a Cloud-based application with a lean, scalable and agile infrastructure, usually with less hardware.
For more, please see our 2011 Efficiency series (#1, #2, #3) on our Perspectives blog, or whitepapers such as Modern Messaging Middleware for Big Data in Motion or Enterprise Messaging Data for the Web.
Electronic Trading Moves Into Fixed Income
Evaluating a price in the Equities or Foreign Exchange (“FX”) markets does not require much calculation, and so one of the prime limiting factors on winning those trades has been the speed of data movement, from one application to another, either within the same host or across the network. But the world of Fixed Income, commonly known as “bonds”, is different. (more…)
Informatica at EMC World – Where Big Data Needs Integration
This week the EMC World 2012 conference is taking place in Las Vegas. Informatica is participating as a partner continuing its commitment to the EMC Select Partnership for the Informatica ILM and MDM solutions. Informatica has continued to expand its partnership to include support for its Greenplum Hadoop distribution – mostly to support organizations needs for big data integration while making big data manageable and secure. (more…)
Real-Time Risk Analytics with Ultra Messaging and Data Transformation
To follow up on our recent blog about B2B Data Transformation and Ultra Messaging Cache Option, we would now like to discuss the same topic within the Capital Markets.
One up-and-coming use case in the Capital Markets that we are excited about is front office real-time risk analytics on streaming market data, to decrease risk by informing traders in real time about potential changes to trading strategies, based on the most up-to-date data possible.
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