High Frequency Trading: System Reliability Makes or Breaks Financial Traders

Profits, reputation, and market leadership rely on lightening fast systems, designed for extreme performance – consistently 24 x 7.

Speed is everything in financial markets. Orders transacted in milliseconds translate to real dollars for traders, with the winner of the race taking the prize. This is high frequency trading (HFT) or using complex algorithms to analyse and adjust to market conditions and execute smart, profitable trades in fractions of seconds. Because HFT solutions are some of the most sophisticated technical tools on the modern trading landscape, their uniquely intense performance requirements demand a closer look at how systems are tested, developed, integrated and deployed.

A Quick Primer on High Frequency Trading (HFT)

HFT is not new, although its role has advanced in step with global growth of financial trading. The process allows investors and fund managers to re-allocate portfolios within milliseconds of acquiring market information. Profits are earned or protected and the entire market benefits from systematic liquidity. HFT became widespread when major exchanges offered rebates as incentives for traders adding liquidity to the market. This is a source of profit separate from the trades themselves, where lightning fast trades capitalise on even the smallest adjustments in market conditions. These enticements have driven traders to recognise that, with the right compute power, they could create both profits and leadership.

Modern HFT Systems

Trades that take place in milliseconds require a complete system with interconnected technologies, best-of-breed systems. All components must be built to prioritise speed, and keep latency as low as possible. Servers, network interfaces, storage, switches and even length and type of cables all impact on the overall performance of an HFT system.

XENON eXtreme^TM HFT Servers

XENON’s range of eXtreme HFT servers are built, tested and customised for exchanges worldwide — designed to conveniently drop into any data centre infrastructure. Greater than the sum of their parts, XENON’s solutions feature
custom design of chassis, air flow, liquid cooling systems, high-speed fans, CPU, memory, and more, with each component recognised as critical to assuring fast, reliable performance.

XENON eXtreme HFT servers are engineered in house, from our expert team of high performance computing specialists. Each system is designed form the BIOS up to provide consistent low latency performance and speed.

All eXtreme servers are bench tested for days, run in at a higher than normal environmental temperature and with simulated processing workloads. This exhaustive testing ensures that our eXtreme servers will perform consistently and the speed and latency you need to win.

XENON: Complete Trading Infrastructure Provider

XENON provides a complete server for financial market traders – from the XENON eXtreme range of servers, to FPGA cards, NIC’s, storage, switches and cables – XENON can assist you to build a complete trading infrastructure that is optimised from the kernel to the edge for speed and low latency.