Managed futures fund Prescient Ridge Management (PRM) is turning to Connamara Systems and its Made-to-Measure trading suite to support its expansion into new markets, using new trading strategies. Made-to-Measure (MtM) bridges build versus buy development approaches by providing pre-built components that can be augmented by proprietary code to form complete trading systems.
PRM currently trades equity indices, fixed income, commodities, energy and metal futures contracts in the U.S. and Europe. By leveraging MtM, it will be able to add additional futures contracts on additional exchanges in Asia and parts of Europe, says PRM president Alan Swimmer. MtM allows PRM to “focus on the fund’s new trading ideas by improving efficiency and increasing scalability,” adds Swimmer.
Initially, PRM will be building upon MtM’s Position Server, DB Recorder, Messaging Subsystem, Risk UI, Trade Signal Translator, FIX Order Adapter and Connamara API components. Longer term, Connamara will be providing engineering and development services to expand the platform into new markets and asset classes.
MtM provides a range of components for market data and exchange connectivity, low-latency and high-frequency trading, trade aggregation and risk. In a typical rollout, around 75% of the functionality is covered by MtM, with 25% custom code being written, estimates Jim Downs, CEO and Founder of Connamara.
While MtM has been built for low latency trading, that’s not the primary focus of PRM, says Downs, who says that factors such as scalability, reliability and maintainability are driving the firm’s engineering decisions.
Downs says MtM was introduced about three years ago and is in use by hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, exchanges and FCMs. Future plans call for additional adaptors for order routing and market data, as well as enhanced risk functions for enterprise risk management.
Connamara also develops and offers the QuickFix open source FIX engine, in both Java and .Net versions.
