Fix Protocol

The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol is an electronic communications protocol initiated in 1992 for international real-time exchange of information related to securities transactions and markets. Managing the delivery of trading applications and keeping latency low increasingly requires an understanding of the FIX protocol. Testing the applications developed based on…

The Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol is the de-facto standard for electronic transaction communication in financial markets. It is widely used by both buy-side and sell-side participants across a range of asset classes including equities, forex, interest rate securities and derivatives. Interfacing kdb+ with the FIX protocol has been previously…

I spend far more time thinking and talking about FIX documentation than… well pretty much anybody I’ve ever met. Despite being an outwardly-boring subject that is just too easy to swat away with objections like “we haven’t updated our FIX documents in donkey’s years” or “we’ve probably already onboarded all…

For almost a decade now, I’ve been evangelizing to people working in FIX connectivity — a niche API format within financial services — about a better way of working. Something that will free them from the daily drudgery of low-value tasks and open up a better, more automated future. What’s Going Wrong? At…

How we use the FIX Protocol within our Algorithmic Trading Platform This is a two-part technical article about FIX and FIX gateways. FIX stands for Financial Information eXchange and is the lingua franca of most electronic trading systems. The first part of this article is a general description of FIX…

In other posts in this series, I’ve introduced some of the key concepts of the FIX protocol, as well as some of the history. In this article, I’d like to dive into the basics of how the protocol itself works. What is a FIX Engine? Where Does It Sit? First of all, we need to talk about an important…

In this article, I’d like to shine a light on an area of FIX that seems to be quite confused in people’s minds, and that is the “security” (or not) of FIX specifications. Current Perspectives The background to this is that we conducted some market research in December 2020 in which we…

If you are interested in financial markets, then you may have come across references to the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol. So what is it, and why is it so important? Let’s start with a bit of history. 27 October 1986 was a pivotal day in the history of the…

One of the trends that we are seeing with more recent trading venues (which tend to be crypto exchanges), is that they are starting to offer both REST/Websocket and FIX interfaces. You might be asking why have both, and what’s the difference between them? I’ll assume here that if you…