Argon Design, a Cambridge, UK-based engineering design consultancy, has developed an ultra-low latency financial trading system for a proprietary trading firm doing latency arbitrage on a leading exchange in the US. The system went live in May and builds on Argon’s September 2013 introduction of high-performance trading technology that combines the benefits of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and x86 server technologies.
Steve Barlow, chief technology officer at Argon Design, explains that the prop trading firm has moved from proof of concept to production with the technology, allowing it to create a more complete arbitrage trading system with sophisticated triggers rather than simple setups that ran during testing.
Argon Design focuses on bespoke systems with specialised engineering, so for this client it built the order book and customised its technology approach to fit the firm’s strategies. The system was tailored to the firm’s applications and designed to run statistics on top of the order book, allowing the firm to calculate metrics such as moving averages while operating with very basic network impact.
Typically, Argon targets small to medium-sized trading firms with its technology, but Barlow remarks that there is a wide variety of customisation that can be done for different use cases. Looking forward, he is interested in finding out how Argon’s complex system design capabilities can be tested with a larger client.
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