Equitec Proprietary Markets LLC
Microsoft .NET Real-Time Market
Data Feed Solution
Industry: Security Brokers and
Dealers
Focus: Business Intelligence, Collaboration
Equitec Proprietary Markets LLC is a global
proprietary trading group with market making and specialist
operations on eight domestic exchanges, as well as on electronic
exchanges throughout Europe. The company is headquartered
in Chicago, with offices in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia
and London.
Equitec trades primary and derivative instruments
in a wide variety of equity, index, financial and structured
products, using a combination of traditional and proprietary
cross-hedging methodologies. Equitec professionals are specialists
in more than 410 equity and derivative classes including Microsoft,
Wal-Mart Stores, Coca Cola, BankAmerica, Tyco, Alcoa, Boeing,
JDS Uniphase, Lucent Technologies, Home Depot, Johnson &
Johnson, Halliburton and GlaxoSmithKline.
The company’s team of 200 professionals
includes IT personnel to support the growth of its quoting,
position management, database and communications systems.
Equitec has developed most of the enabling tools used by its
partners, position managers and traders.
Equitec’s traders, many of whom are
on trading floors using pen-based, handheld devices, rely
on real-time market data feeds such as those from Reuters,
Bloomberg and others for real-time prices, volumes, highs/lows,
etc. Equitec utilizes one of the leading information vendors
for real-time market data feeds.
Equitec’s data feed provider, as with most real-time
market data vendors, requires proprietary software be installed
on each client device that is to utilize the real-time data.
Equitec leveraged the API for this software to develop many
custom, real-time market data applications – each having
to be deployed following its development or enhancement. The
regular deployment of new or enhanced applications was very
costly and time-consuming.
Equitec also recognized that having a single
provider of real-time data in a mission critical trading environment
was risky. They saw the need to be able to dynamically switch
among data feeds to provide fault tolerance, to realize better
performance and to reduce costs. However, real-time market
data vendors have not standardized on client software or an
API. Therefore, real-time data feeds could not be dynamically
added or removed without also dynamically changing client
software, including the custom written applications. This
effort was costly, time-consuming, and did not provide Equitec
the flexibility it desired.
Based on their experience in the financial services industry
and with the Microsoft .NET platform, Equitec called upon
Genisys to model, architect and develop a framework to allow
for an efficient transition between market data vendors. The
solution allowed for a single adaptor to be written for each
vendor and plugged into a client-side application. The adaptor
would then translate a vendor’s API into a common Equitec
Market Data API. Utilizing a pluggable model, Equitec developers
can program for real-time data without learning separate API’s
for each provider. As a new vendor is added, Equitec’s
in-house technology staff can write an adaptor and introduce
the adaptor into the organization’s IT application portfolio.
Any applications that utilize market data could then take
advantage of data services from the new vendor without any
code changes, system maintenance or deployment hassles.
The solution utilizes features within the
.NET framework that allow software components to be updated
automatically from a central source, in this case a SQL Server.
Real-time data providers and user interface components are
built and deployed to a common location. A client-side application,
written using Windows Forms, dynamically loads and instantiates
the components as needed. This allows Equitec to add forms,
change data providers and more without forcing an installation
on the local computer.
The introduction of the market data pluggable model has provided
Equitec the flexibility to switch among market data providers,
without the need to re-write their real-time market data applications.
This could potentially lead to a tremendous reduction in application
development and deployment costs. Also, the implementation
of this solution validated that .NET applications can handle
the intense computational load of dealing with a real-time
market tick feed, paving the way for future .NET applications
at Equitec.
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional,
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, XML
Web Services, Reuters Datafeed, Microsoft Visio
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