Trading Applications
Trading applications all share a common need: to keep up with growing market data and transaction rates, and to operate with near-zero latency. Examples of the trading applications include:
Pre-trade Analysis
Pre-trade validation, checking orders for errors, checking against limits, pre-trade compliance, and a host of other pre-trade applications all share the need to manage and integrate increasing market data rates—without slowing down the order. This requires technology that can handle massive data volumes, manage throughput, and handle the complex logic necessary to execute an order—all core capabilities of the Aleri Streaming Platform.
Market Data Enrichment
This can take a variety of forms: supplementing the basic data received from exchanges with value-added computed fields, dynamically selecting data sources, latency monitoring of data sources, combining data from multiple sources, data cleansing, or computing proprietary stats.
Market Depth—Order Book Aggregation and Analysis
Many firms find it very challenging to work with so called "level 2" data—full depth order books. Traditionally the task ended at simply displaying the order book. But with fragmented markets, there is now the need to build a single view of the market from multiple, individual order books, and the end user is no longer human eyes, but algorithms that automate the market analysis. Most tools available are not able to handle the complexity of data manipulation at the speeds required. The Aleri Streaming Platform makes this extremely easy—real-time aggregation of fast moving data is its specialty, and once the data has been aggregated, it's in a form that is ready for analysis, not just viewing. (read more about our new MLA application built on the Aleri Platform)
Market Making—Auto Quoting
As the markets have shifted to electronic trading, most of the market making has become automated, using automated pricing engines to adjust rates based on movements in the market. Building a pricing engine from scratch is an extremely time consuming task—and once it's built there is the ongoing challenge of maintaining it. Off-the-shelf pricing applications can be a short-cut, but don't provide much flexibility. The Aleri Streaming Platform bridges the gap by providing high level authoring tools that let you quickly implement your own proprietary data cleansing and pricing logic, coupled with a high performance complex event processing engine that ensures your prices react to market movements with absolute minimal latency.
Algorithmic Trading, Strategy Trading
Whether it's a proprietary execution algorithm or algorithms that scan the market for trading opportunities, the Aleri Streaming Platform provides an ideal basis for implementation. The high throughput, low latency characteristics of the technology ensure that it can handle today's market data rates—and those of the future. The high level authoring tools speed the implementation and deployment process by decoupling the logic from the data—which also results in an implementation that can be easily modified as algorithms are refined.
Trade Data Capture—Compliance and Reporting
With new and ever-changing rules covering how, when, and where trades must be executed, tools are needed to capture data in a way that facilitates compliance monitoring and reporting—without slowing down the trading process. The Aleri Streaming Platform can capture any data required, in a format that enables complete reporting, as part of the in-line trading process. High performance disk-based persistence ensures that data is safe while still handling the throughput requirements of today's trading environment.
All of these applications can benefit from the high throughput, ultra-low latency performance characteristics of the Aleri Streaming Platform. What's more, the Aleri Streaming Platform is not limited to specific asset classes, and it provides unlimited flexibility for addressing all types of trading challenges.
Reg NMS and MiFID Compliance—Best Execution and Smart Order Routing
While very different in scope and specifics, the Order Protection Rule that is part of Reg NMS and the Best Execution requirements that are contained within MiFID place some common challenges on the trade routing infrastructure of sell-side firms. In the simpler case of Reg NMS, order routing technology needs to be updated to address the new rules and order routing needs to happen on the basis of where the best price exists in a protected form. The best execution requirements of MiFID similarly mean that new order routing mechanisms need to be put in place, taking into account not just price but a variety of other factors as well, including customer preferences. And both of these regulations require that data is captured to show compliance. All of this will challenge traditional order routing mechanisms. The Aleri Streaming Platform is ideally suited to implementing the new order routing rules due to it's flexibility, speed of deployment, and low latency characteristics combined with throughput capacity that can allow it to absorb all the market data needed to properly route orders. Click to learn more.