The FIX Trading Community has officially released a FIX version that supports high performance transactions and data feeds.
A version of the FIX electronic trading protocol that supports high-performance transactions and data feeds is officially launching via the FIX Trading Community standards body, in an effort to help securities firms keep up with high-speed hardware, software and network connections.
The standards body is releasing “a standard, non-proprietary binary message encoding” upgrade, dubbed the Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) version 1.0 Draft Standard of FIX.
The new version has been optimized for low-latency implementations, including the encoding and decoding of messages in tens of nanoseconds, officials say.
The exchanges conglomerate, the CME Group, the Moscow Exchange and market data and news giant Thomson Reuters are already using the new version. For instance, the CME Group is using FIX SBE for market data interfaces to its Globex trading platform, according to a statement from Fred Malabre, senior director, architecture and product management at the CME Group.
FIX has been reaching out beyond its initial role as a front office trading protocol.
Earlier this month, the standards body announced that FIX will be expanding its reach to accommodate data and trade reporting requirements for MiFID II.
Over the past several years, the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) has been moving into the post-trade realm with 75 percent of broker/dealer respondents in a 2015 survey saying they use FIX for confirmation/affirmation workflows. The standards body conducted the Global Post-Trade Survey to clarify the usage of FIX 4.4 in post-trade workflows. The survey is also an effort to sort out a roadmap for the Global Post-Trade Working Group (GPTWG) of the standards body, including the geographic reach and asset class coverage for the protocol.
For FIX SBE, its authors has implemented a bandwidth utilization that is “reasonably small,” according to the High Performance Working Group of the FIX Trading Community. “This encoding specification describes the wire protocol for messages (presentation layer). Thus, it provides a standard for interoperability between communicating parties. Users are free to implement the standard in a way that best suits their needs. The encoding standard is complimentary to other FIX standards for session protocol and application level behavior. SBE is intended to represent all FIX semantics,” according to the working group.
The new binary type system dispenses with “printable character representations of FIX tag=value encoding,” officials say. Instead, “the type system binds to native binary data types, and defines derived types as needed.”
Officials add that the enhanced binary type system:
- “Provides a means to specify precision of decimal numbers and timestamps, as well as valid ranges of numbers;”
- “Differentiates fixed-length character arrays from variable-length strings;”
- And “provides a consistent system of enumerations and multiple-choice fields.”
FIX SBE has been designed for direct data access “without complex transformations or conditional logic,” officials add. The standards body and working group achieved via the usage of “native binary data types and simple types derived from native binaries, such as prices and timestamps.” The design also has a preference for fixed positions and fixed length fields, supporting direct access to data and avoiding the need for management of heaps of variable-length elements which must be sequentially processed.
The content of a FIX SBE message type is specified by a schema “that tells which fields belong to a message and their location within a message,” according to the working group. “Additionally, the metadata describes valid value ranges and information that need not be sent on the wire, such as constant values. Message schemas may be based on standard FIX message specifications, or may be customized as needed by agreement between counterparties,” officials say.
This new FIX variation “is the culmination of four years of collaboration by working group participants,” says Don Mendelson, chair of the FIX Simple Binary Encoding Subgroup, in a prepared statement. “Thanks to their hard work, SBE has already been successfully used by CME Group, Moscow Exchange, Thomson Reuters and others.”
The new FIX version has open source implementations developed by Real Logic for messaging libraries.
“ASCII message encodings, such as FIX tag value, are now one of the most inefficient stages of transaction processing,” explains Martin Thompson, founder of Real Logic, in a statement. “It is great to see the FIX community leading the way with the most efficient binary protocol for financial messages, and validating the specification by supporting an open source reference implementation. The SBE initiative can benefit the whole community in terms of efficient use of development effort, CPU, and storage resources.”
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