technology

Our institutional-grade, cloud-based trading platform.

June / 2021

hejduk_cathedral

The Trading Platform

A semi-technical post about how we built an institutional-grade algorithmic trading platform from scratch in the cloud.


Any industry insider knows about the technology arms race that is pervasive in the industry. Some participants spend tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars a year on fancy infrastructure to gain an edge of nanoseconds over other participants...

January / 2022

trading_ui_candle_stick

Trading in the Cloud: Market Microstructure Considerations

Does a US Equities agency broker need ultra-low latency?


There is a widely held belief that unless you spend like 10 million dollars getting as close as possible to the exchanges, and subscribe to the fastest/most expensive connectivity lines and feeds, you can’t really “compete”....

June / 2021

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The Message Bus

A technical deep-dive describing the custom messaging middleware that powers Proof’s Algorithmic Trading Platform in the cloud.


Let’s recall the problem we are trying to solve: we have a stream of messages that we need to send from a producer to one or more remote consumers, in the fastest way possible...

December / 2019

pollen_street_social_neri_and_hu

Selecting a Database for an Algorithmic Trading System

In this technical post, we talk about the specific characteristics that are important to us in the database serving our Algorithmic Trading Platform.


There isn’t a single perfect database that provides support for transactions, time-series data management, and ultra-fast analytics, along with being free or affordable...

March / 2022

calendar

A Holiday Calendar For The Ops Team

A Trading and Settlement Calendar for US Equities.


A reliable and easy-to-use holiday calendar (aka a trading & settlement calendar) is an invaluable tool in the arsenal of any ops professional — and this includes both technology operations as well as business ops folks...

January / 2022

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Building a High Performance Trading System in the Cloud

A discussion on why and how running a low-latency trading system in the cloud is feasible.


When talking about latency, a few things need to be straightened out upfront: What do you mean by low latency? Latency from what to what and how is it measured...

September / 2020

bfi_national_archive

Archiving Books and Records for a Broker-Dealer

How to archive the relevant books and records for my broker-dealer in compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4 and FINRA Rule 4511.


SEC/FINRA rules require broker-dealers to archive records in a non-destructive format for a certain period of time, say 2–7 years, depending on what is being archived...

February / 2022

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Security Master

The basics of a US equities security master, why it is a challenge, and how we compile a scrappy but fairly accurate security master each morning from free or inexpensive sources.


Security Master is a fancy industry term referring to the list of securities known to a trading system on any given day. It sounds innocuous — how hard can it be to list out all publicly-traded US stocks? — but it is a deceptively hard job...

September / 2021

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FIX Gateways

A two-part technical article about FIX and FIX gateways.


The first part of this article is a general description of FIX and FIX gateways, while the second part details how we modified QuickFIX/J to work with our sequenced-stream-based architecture, such that our gateways can recover state without using disk-based FIX logs...

May / 2020

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Setting up a Tick Data Research Environment

In this technical post, we expand upon these thoughts and explore what it takes to set up a productive tick data research environment.


A tick data research environment consists of much more than the database and analysis tools. More specifically, it involves the acquisition/capture and timely processing of tick and reference data into a cleansed, normalized, and complete data set...

Proof Trading, Inc.
176 Broadway #15D
New York, NY 10038

Securities transactions are conducted through Proof Services LLC ("PSL"), a broker-dealer subsidiary of Proof Trading, Inc. Proof Services LLC is a member of FINRA and SIPC. Check the background of this Broker-Dealer and its registered investment professionals on FINRA's BrokerCheck.