Industry news & insights.

In today's #90secondFIX, Chris Lees answers the question of why the FIX protocol has so much variability to it. The FIX protocol itself is flexible by design. Trading venues, investment banks, they all compete based on functionality, and therefore the protocol needs enough consistency to allow people to understand what is being articulated,

FIX Algorithmic Trading Definition Language, better known as FIXatdl, is a standard for the exchange of meta-information developed in the mid-2000s to address the problems around algorithmic trading definition. An algo is driven by a series of parameters that the bank needs its customers to send in. How do you define these things? How do you convey exactly what the parameters are? What the valid values are? How should they be laid out on a particular UI section, for example?

In this mini-series as part of #doFIXdifferently​, Chris Lees introduces FIX log parsers; what they are, how they can help you and your team, and takes a look at some examples of parsers currently available.

How can you improve your FIX conformance testing? Chris Lees shares his 10 top tips. Organize your conformance test really clearly. Make sure they're in well-defined sections that are easy to remove. Tie them to customer capabilities as you go through things with your customer. You'll understand what they're capable of; track those things as you go...

What does your FIX team look like in 2021? It's safe to say that our working environments have changed somewhat since this time last year. But how have teams had to adapt to the current status quo, and how can FIX teams remain united when working remotely? In this episode of #doFIXdifferently, Chris Lees shares his top tips for managing a FIX connectivity team in a fragmented world.

What is FIX API conformance or certification, and why do you need it? When someone's trying to connect to your API for the first time, it's important to test the connection to ensure that they can talk to your API correctly and effectively. Doing this in the UAT, or a customer test environment prevents any issues from arising prior to going into production.

Why are more firms merging their production support and FIX onboarding functions? What are the advantages of re-using niche skills and tools? We explore the reasons why this is happening and argue the importance of giving production support better tooling, to allow them to handle more first-line FIX support which – in turn – can free up your FIX onboarders to bring on more customers faster.

Should API documentation be machine-readable or human-readable? Can firms move away from legacy documentation formats, such as Word, and create, edit, and distribute specs in a way that satisfies both? FinSpec schema is a machine-readable documentation format, which allows firms to electronically capture their API dictionary, grammar, workflows, and state machine. It also gives you the ability to capture things like change history, and layout, plus crucially also capture customer-specific transformations and normalisations.

Chris Lees discusses the challenge for firms completing FIX migration projects. We primarily focus on FIX engine migration, but large migration projects often include multiple pieces of FIX infrastructure. We cover key areas, including API consistency (vocabulary and dictionary), migrating customer-specific transformations, managing network changes, and all-important project tracking & reporting.

In this week's #dofixdifferently, Chris Lees talks to Christoph John, one of the key contributors to the QuickFIX/J FIX engine. Christoph is a Senior Software Developer for MACD, a financial services software company over in Aachen, Germany. Since 2011 Christoph has been a core code contributor to the QuickFIX/J engine, which is a full-featured FIX messaging engine written 100% in Java. We dive into what it's like to run open-source software, the history of the QuickFIX/J engine, and how you can get involved.