Foreign Exchange Trading


In 2010, the average turnover of the foreign exchange (FX) market was estimated to be four trillion dollars a day, dwarfing debt and equity markets. The market has been evolving quickly in the last few years, and to succeed banks need to address a number of significant new challenges.

Key Challenges

  • Third-Party Liquidity: The banks that intermediate FX trading have historically had access to a steady supply of FX trading and liquidity from corporate and institutional customers alone, but recently they’ve had to adapt to the advent of ECNs and other third party sources of liquidity.
  • High-Frequency FX Trading: They’ve also had to speed up their systems to meet the needs of fast-moving hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms that have embraced FX trading to expand beyond saturated equity markets. This has made low latency a critical success factor because slow delivery of FX rates to customers results in uncompetitive and unfair prices, and the bank may even have to reject customer orders because the delivery of rates or processing of orders was too slow.
  • Price Stream Proliferation: Another complication is the need to generate and deliver adjusted price streams for different classes of customer. Some FX trading platforms stream rate data to clients over hundreds of thousands of unique message distribution streams, far more than equity platforms which have fewer price streams with more consumers per stream.

Solace’s Solution

Solace’s high-performance messaging platform is the ideal foundation for FX trading systems with support for the many kinds of messaging that go into FX trading systems, and the unique ability to maintain low latency even at the very high volumes FX trading demands.

  • Single Dealer Platforms: Solace supports internet data streaming (via HTML5 and other technologies) with the same API used for enterprise messaging so it’s easy to present data from across asset classes via a consolidated interface that lets traders quickly identify and act on opportunities.
  • Solace centrally filters market data and delivers it over discrete TCP connections so each consumer gets exactly and only the information they want, unlike multicast systems that force client-side software to receive and filter lots of data they don’t want.
  • Client-specified flow control lets consumers determine how many updates per second they want per topic, so algo engines can subscribe to every tick while human traders being fed rates via their mobile device can ask to be sent a few updates per second.
  • Integrated WAN Distribution means with Solace you can easily keep globally distributed datastores in sync.