Exegy Xero Sets Speed Benchmark for CME Trading
Trading platform proves sub-microsecond tick-to-trade performance in new STAC benchmark report
ST. LOUIS – 16 October 2019 – Exegy Inc., the leading provider of low-latency technology and managed services for multi-asset electronic trading, has today announced a new hardware-based trading platform, Xero, that can execute trading algorithms in less than a microsecond. Exegy developed Xero in response to customer demand for turnkey solutions that accelerate market making and proprietary trading strategies, as well as defensive mechanisms that prevent losing trades in fast-moving markets. As an off-the-shelf product, Xero eliminates the high cost, long development time, and technical risk of building custom hardware internally. “Firms asked us for assistance in competing in the ongoing ‘race to zero’ and this exciting new product is our bold response. Xero underscores our ongoing commitment to delivering the highest levels of performance with a premium user experience,” says Chief Technology Officer David Taylor.
Xero performs speed-critical functions in reconfigurable logic within a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that includes embedded network interfaces. Those interfaces directly connect to the market data feed and order entry gateway of a trading venue. Xero performs market data feed normalization and order submission to support “fast path” trading functions in reconfigurable logic. Trading applications control “fast path” functions and perform additional functions in software via an easy-to-use API.
Xero provides flexible deployment options to suit the needs of a broad range of trading applications. It is available as a low-profile Network Interface Card (NIC) and accompanying software that can be installed on the same server that hosts a trading application. Xero also seamlessly integrates with Exegy’s line of hardware-accelerated appliances, the Exegy Ticker Plant and Exegy Market Data System. With an industry-leading combination of low latency, high capacity, robust features, and extensive data feed coverage, these proven solutions have won the trust of elite buy-side firms and sell-side trading desks engaged in global multi-asset trading.
Xero is the first hardware “tick-to-trade” solution whose performance has been verified independently by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®). Published today, the new STAC-T1.EMINI™ Benchmark Report details the time required to consume recorded market data for CME E-mini futures, compute specified trading logic, and send orders to simulated exchange gateways. The tick-to-trade measurements used network timestamping by a Corvil CNE-6550 appliance connected to optical taps on the network links for market data and order gateway connectivity. The STAC Report is available at www.STACresearch.com/news/EXG191010.
Exegy, Corvil, and STAC collaborated closely on updating the benchmark to use the latest CME market data and order entry specifications, as well as provide more accurate measurements suitable for Xero’s sub-microsecond performance. “Customer-driven STAC Benchmark specifications like STAC-T1 have become the objective standard for comparing the performance of vendor solutions for speed-critical trading applications. We are pleased that Exegy championed this update of the STAC CME tick-to-trade benchmark suite and provided the first opportunity to use it to evaluate a hardware solution,” says STAC founder and executive director, Peter Lankford.
When replaying CME market data at the recorded rate and eight times the recorded rate, the tick-to-trade latency distribution of Xero was consistently 0.552 microseconds at the mean and 0.609 microseconds at the 99thpercentile for the Start-of-Message to Start-of-Frame (SOM-to-SOF) measurement.[1] Using the Corvil appliance, measurement uncertainty was held to less than 0.0245 microseconds. Additional measurements are detailed in the STAC Report.
In addition to establishing a new standard for performance, Xero delivers a premium user experience supported by Exegy’s global managed services team. Proactive exchange-directed change (EDC) management and expert-level developer support ensure successful launches and maintenance of hardware-accelerated trading strategies. Exegy also engages with Xero customers to define new Fast Path functions and parameters that expand the set of trading functions executed at hardware speeds.
About Exegy, Inc.
Exegy provides low-latency market data normalization and distribution, market connectivity and price aggregation, and real-time trading signals to elite firms in the financial services industry. Today Exegy serves as a strategic partner to leading principal traders, agency brokers, Alternative Trading System (ATS) and dark pool operators, market makers, hedge funds, and asset managers. At the heart of Exegy solutions are purpose-built, hardware-accelerated appliances derived from an extensive portfolio of patented and patent-pending technology. All solutions are delivered as a fully managed service backed by a global team of experts and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Exegy promotes the design of robust electronic markets through its MarketDataPeaks service that reports real-time market data feed rates.
For more information, please visit www.exegy.com and follow Exegy on LinkedIn and Twitter @ExegyMarketData.
“STAC” and all STAC names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Securities Technology Analysis Center, LLC.
[1] Benchmark ID: STAC-T1.EMINI.vB.8x.SOM-to-SOF
Contact: media@exegy.com
