Technical & Functional Testing Services for Financial Industry

In today’s cut throat competitive world, exchange venues battle to have faster execution times for the high frequency trading desks in order to take advantage of ever changing trading opportunities. Hedge funds and investment banks contest to increase speed to market, and offer potential platforms to their customers and for internal use. Order latency is now measured in microseconds with clock resolution in nanoseconds. While trading becomes more and more dependent on IT, market regulators struggle to keep up with the possible vulnerabilities. The rapid pace of change and cutting edge technologies pose new challenges to hardware designers, system architects, developers and testers.

This paper takes a look at the critical practice of High Frequency Trading (HFT), explains what it is, describes some key concepts and focus on specific areas that can impact system performance. The white paper also covers “Flash Crash” of 6th May 2010 and resulting regulations, and finally, discuss testing challenges and provide some recommendations.