FIX focuses on high performance with consolidated effort
FIX Trading Community has combined all its high performance trading and market data initiatives into a single working group, ’emphasising the importance that high performance has in the FIX family of standards’.
The next generation of the FIX Protocol will fully support high performance on all levels (application, presentation, session) to offer an open standard that can replace today’s proprietary interfaces for high performance trading and market data.
The existing High Performance Working Group will be extended with additional subgroups and include initiatives previously conducted by the Market Data Optimization Working Group, with the combined entity reporting directly into the FIX Global Technical Committee.
The work will look at incorporating other standards work, including the lightweight real-time point-to-point SoupBinTCP protocol and Nasdaq’s ITCH and OUCH protocols. ITCH is a transmission-only interface that lets Nasdaq users share and track information about trading; OUCH is for placing, executing or cancelling orders in the Nasdaq options market.
Jim Northey, Co-Chair FIX Global Technical Committee, Senior Partner, LaSalle Technology Group, said: “We thoroughly analysed the de facto standard and concluded there is still a need for a well-engineered high performance trading standard that encompasses key features of FIX, FIX Session Layer, ITCH, OUCH, SoupBinTCP/UFO. I am particularly excited by our work that captures the essential use cases of Itch, while being grounded in FIX. Our emerging standard is extensible and addresses the entire functionality required for market data dissemination.”
Fred Malabre, senior director, CME Group, said: “Over these last two years volunteers of the High Performance Working Group delivered Release Candidate Specifications for a high-performance version of FIX Protocol covering all layers, which provides a strong foundation for the next generation of FIX Protocol. I look forward to the extension of the working group to continue addressing business and standardisation needs within the industry.”
To view the FIX High Performance Specifications and their current status please click here.
