Industry news & insights.

In a production support or analyst function, a key part of your role is to identify and resolve issues that may be stopping customers trade effectively day-to-day. As well as affecting their bottom line, your ability to troubleshoot, pinpoint, and resolve issues will have a direct impact on their perception of you as an organisation and the quality of your customer service.

One of the trends that we are seeing with more recent trading venues (which tend to be crypto exchanges), is that they are starting to offer both REST/Websocket and FIX interfaces. You might be asking why have both, and what’s the difference between them?

FIX Protocol has undoubtedly been a success story in the industry. When it was launched it was well ahead of its time but as the protocol matures, progress has understandably slowed. At a time when the wider API ecosystem is booming, Chris Lees asks whether the FIX Protocol can remain relevant for the long term.

Many firms that we speak to secretly struggle with FIX connectivity. Much like a duck moving across water, the internal reality of FIX connectivity is often quite different, which is why I suggest that firms secretly struggle with connectivity. For almost a decade, we’ve been talking to firms about what works and what doesn’t, and we’ve distilled these down into five principles for successful FIX connectivity.

Here at FixSpec we think of API documentation as a "contract" between two parties. It describes available messages, fields, and enumerations and workflows. It tells readers that if they send X in, they can expect Y in return. Customer-specific specs take this a step further by removing anything that a specific customer doesn't use, and extends the documentation to capture bespoke customisations and transformations. This has a number of benefits to both the sender and receiver.

In this week's #doFIXdifferently, we take a look at how firms currently use log files, and how they can be a gold mine of information about your API and your customers. Today logs are everywhere and easily accessible, and if you have a question about how your API is behaving, then logs are often the first port of call. Some firms are using tools like Elastic Search of Splunk to manage and understand logs. But what do you actually do with them?

Chris Lees explores what a more automated vision of a FIX pipeline might look like. A rapidly-emerging trend in software deployment is the idea of continuous integration and deployment. Done correctly, it can dramatically accelerate your software lifecycle without compromising testing. In this episode, Chris walks through how continual integration/deployment might apply to the #FIXProtocol world. And identify machine-readable documentation as THE critical lynchpin to making it work.

In this week's #90secondFIX, Chris Lees explores how to get the most out of PDF and XML FIX documentation. Where having accurate PDF and XML documentation is good, how can we take it a step further and make it easier to manage internally, and easier to understand for your customers.