All posts by Trading Technologies

Help is at Your Fingertips

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LinkedIn

“Nobody reads the manual” is a common refrain when discussing documentation. For software, many users simply open the program, fumble around and begin using the application without looking at a setup guide or pressing F1 for help. And many users who search for a “getting started guide” are confronted with a vast repository of .pdf files, requiring a best guess at which tome contains the nugget of information they need. With mobile and desktop applications increasing in usability, the dusty old users’ manual seems more like a bygone artifact of antiquity than a required, helpful aid.

Which explains, in part, why TT abandoned user manuals.

Everything from our system administration and user manuals to our setup and getting started guides has been opened to the internet via the new Help Library. This allows a user to open the browser, enter a search term and quickly find the information they need. Want to find out howX_TRADER supports NYMEX products? Or simply how to collect logfiles in TT User Setup? You can now access all TT content in less than a second—without searching a 200+ page document.

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Sweden, Ahead of the Times

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LinkedIn
Sweden celebrates National Day each year on June 6.*

Somewhat unique among monarchies, instead of a family motto upon accession to the throne, the sovereign of Sweden will adopt a personal motto. This often serves as a national motto as well, and is printed on their 1 krona coins.

Upon taking the throne in 1973, the current Swedish monarch, King Carl XVI Gustaf, adopted the motto For Sweden—with the times. This motto reflected his desire for both himself and his country to constantly evolve to adapt to the modern world. When it comes to navigating the recent eurozone crisis, though, in many ways Sweden, along with the other Nordic countries, was ahead of its time.

Nordic countries were largely spared the crisis that unfolded in the eurozone over the last few years. In part, that is likely because the Nordic countries had already been through their own version a couple decades earlier, and had already made structural changes to their economies that allowed them to weather the recent storm. As the eurozone shows signs of stabilizing, the Nordic countries, and Sweden chief among them, are poised to see growth accelerate.\
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In a Real FIX

By:
LinkedIn


The wonders of modern technology are miraculous. Who wasn’t amazed by the news of Voyager I’s departure from the solar system into interstellar space? This feat seems incredible with current technology, let alone with propulsion, guidance and communication systems designed and built almost 40 years ago. With the scientific and engineering capabilities of the modern world, what technology problem can no longer be solved through the concerted efforts of smart engineers?

Let me offer one: financial systems interoperability. “Blasphemy,” you say, “have you not heard of FIX protocol, that cure for the financial industry’s tower of babel?” Sure, I know about FIX (Financial Information eXchange), which includes version 5.0, introduced around seven years ago, as well as the versions firms actually use, namely FIX 4.2 and FIX 4.4, which are 13 and 10 years old respectively.

So what’s the problem with FIX? Before discussing it, I want to clearly state that FIX goes a long way toward enabling integration of financial systems. But it doesn’t go all the way. In a world where fancy toys and even some kitchen gadgets offer plug-and-play interoperability with the Internet, it seems ironic to me that systems used by multi-billion dollar banks and asset managers can take weeks or months to integrate using FIX. FIX gets you into the ballpark, but you have to expend a huge amount of time and effort to locate your seat.

Ambiguity is a major issue, resulting in applications such as back-office and order management systems using different ways of expressing the same thing. You might know that FIX messages are built around sets of tags, where each tag is used to define a required or optional message attribute. The problem is that a fair amount of latitude is granted in the interpretation and use of many critical FIX tags. So the process of integrating two “standard” FIX-enabled systems often involves clunky gymnastics, such as tag remapping, suppression and injection. And no FIX integration effort is complete without the conformance test process, which often involves a fair amount of trial and error to get things right. This requires a lot of time and money, and can result in brittle integrations that often don’t accommodate new financial instruments without additional work.

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Study on Study

By:
LinkedIn

With the release of X_STUDY® 7.8.0, users of our charting application can now apply a technical indicator (or study) to the value of another technical indicator. Although this feature can be used in many ways, two primary ways are to help measure market conditions and increase or improve trading signals. I’ll show a few simple examples of this feature, which we call study on study.

Measuring Market Conditions

A classic study on study is to place a moving average on the volume indicator. Averaging the last few volume bars helps to gauge what kind of tempo the market is experiencing relative to the past. In addition, volume levels are compared to averages, especially at highs and lows.

Figure 1: One-minute September E-mini S&P 500 chart

Figure 1 above shows a chart with a red moving average placed on the volume indicator. Notice I also added a second study on study with an orange max indicator applied to volume. This max study simply finds the maximum value over the user-defined look-back period. Both the simple moving average and the maximum indicators are looking back 20 bars.

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At the Core of Autospreader®

By:
LinkedIn

With a few blogs already posted on using Autospreader, I thought it would be good to take a step back, look at the basic functionality of TT’s Autospreader and provide some insight on how it works.

In my former life as a market maker at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), it was instilled in me very early on that no trade should occur without knowing ahead of time how that trade would be offset or hedged with another trade. I won’t get into the details of options trading and all the potential strategies here, but there are numerous ways to hedge trades and create a position that could make a profit or incur a loss based on many different factors.

Every trade that involves another trade against it in another contract to create a position could be referred to as a spread. At the most basic level, spread trading involves buying one contract and selling another contract at the same time. The basic premise behind spread trading is that you can profit from the changes in the pricing relationships of two or more contracts or products.

The mindset and habits I learned from trading options and taking advantage of price discrepancies involving multiple products carried over to the futures world, where spread trading has been around since the inception of futures products and contracts.
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