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FIX FAQs

The FIX Protocol

  1. What is FIX?
  2. Who uses FIX?
  3. Why FIX rather than a proprietary electronic trading protocol?

B2BITS FIX Engines

  1. How does B2BITS FIX engine range differ to that of competitors?
  2. Who are B2BITS’ Clients?
  3. Antenna Java FIX Engine
  4. FIX Antenna C++ FIX Engine
  5. FIX Antenna .Net FIX Engine
  6. What is FIXEdge?
  7. FIX Engine Performance
  8. What asset classes (Equities, FX, Derivatives, Fixed Income etc.) can I use FIX Antenna to trade?
  9. What versions of the FIX protocol do B2BITS engines support?
  10. Platforms
  11. APIs and Integration Paths
  12. How much does this cost?

B2BITS Testing Services

  1. FIX Antenna Certification and Testing Service (FACTS)
  2. Dynamic Auto Regression testing (DART)
  3. Real-time Exchange for FIX (REEF)
  4. Forensic FIX Tools

The FIX Protocol

1. What is FIX?

FIX stands for Financial Information eXchange. It is an open protocol owned and maintained by The FIX Protocol Organisation. Essentially it is a universal messaging 'language' that brokers, fund managers and exchanges use to communicate securities transactions. However, in itself it is not a software application; it only dictates the format that the message and the means of maintaining the conversation must take.

FIX messaging has multiple advantages over conventional trading by phone and fax:

  • Speed — execution occurs more rapidly after decision making
  • Reduction in error rates - through less manual involvement
  • Time saving — traders can deal with more clients and trades as each trade takes less time to execute and not all trades require manual intervention

2. Who uses FIX?

Brokers — enables brokers to accept more incoming trades by reducing the time taken to process each trade.

Exchanges — enables exchange members to contact multiple exchanges via a single process and to send orders more quickly and more cheaply. With the performance levels achieved by FIX Antenna, we are ready to enable exchanges to self-distribute quotes using the FIX protocol — possibly over UDP — we can facilitate this at both the distributor and recipient site. [c.f. FIXEdge]

ECNs and Crossing Networks — enables ECNs to come to market with no need to force proprietary communications technology onto clients, reducing barriers to entry and increasing potential client base, as well as the benefits to all exchanges mentioned above.

Portfolio Managers — use FIX to access more pools of liquidity, get better prices and trade more efficiently. By using FIX, rather than phone or fax, portfolio managers can connect to significantly more brokers and ECNs. FIX also enables brokers to receive real-time market information either to track their existing positions or to receive general market data including news, IOIs, advertisements and quotes.

3. Why FIX rather than a proprietary electronic trading protocol?

To use an analogy, it is rather like working on a trading floor of 20 people each of whom speaks a different language. Learning 19 languages would be a waste of resources and time; therefore most people would only learn the few languages they absolutely needed to conduct their business, tolerating some inefficiency in their work to avoid up front costs. The better solution is to all learn one common language — an Esperanto for financial markets — this is the role that the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) Protocol fulfils.

B2BITS FIX Engines

1. How does B2BITS FIX engine range differ to that of competitors?

Vision

The common language of FIX needs a translator from internal data representations — a FIX Engine — in order that a firm can begin to gain the business benefits of FIX. The business difficulty has been that to build or buy such a translator has been expensive, so comparatively few could justify such expenditure. FIX engines have been affordable to, and implemented by, only the largest buy-side and sell-side firms.

B2BITS has from the outset developed its software in order to fulfil the original vision of the FIX Protocol as a lingua franca for all financial market participants through the introduction of engines (FIX Antenna) and services at affordable prices.

Speed

FIX Antenna C++ Edition is the fastest performing engine in the marketplace, achieving 14,000 messages per second on entry level Linux hardware in tests conducted by Sun Microsystems.

Support

B2BITS views software without support as incomplete. We do not charge licence fees. All our products are sold on the basis of a comprehensive contract which includes:

  • A full technical support agreement
  • All subsequent improvements to the software, including changes to the FIX protocol and any improvements in functionality
  • All improvements made on request by individual clients are passed back to the supported user base unless deemed proprietary by them
  • Access to other value-added services such as testing and diagnostic tools

In this way B2BITS' single incentive is to provide the best possible service to our clients, as our revenues are dependent on renewal of these support agreements.

2. Who are B2BITS' Clients?

Reference clients are as follows:

  • ABN AMRO
    • FIX Antenna C++ implemented worldwide
  • Charles Schwab Capital Markets
    • FIX Antenna (C++ and Java) implemented for program trading, message transformation and routing
  • Schroder Salomon Smith Barney (CitiGroup)
    • FACTS (FIX Antenna Connectivity Testing Service) implemented for automated testing of their worldwide client base's FIX capability

References from the companies above are available on request. This is just a selection of our client base. We have over 70 companies worldwide using our software.

Furthermore Sun Microsystems and B2BITS have come together to offer one of the first FIX appliances, named FIXEdge which will be distributed and supported through Sun's worldwide network.

3. Antenna Java FIX Engine

FIX Antenna Java was previously known as FIX Antenna Plus. It offers outstanding reliability, ease of implementation, and supports transformation between FIX 4.x and FIX 4.y and between FIXML and tag value format.

We have recently released the latest version of FIX Antenna Java which has resulted in a significant performance improvement. The Java engine is now capable of over 7,000 messages per second on single processor hardware. Again this is class leading performance.

4. FIX Antenna C++ FIX Engine

FIX Antenna C++, formerly known as FIX Antenna V12, is the industry leader in performance, benchmarked at 14,000 messages per second on a single processor machine in tests by Sun Microsystems.

FIX Antenna C++ also received the highest user satisfaction rating for a Sell-Side FIX Engine Vendor in the FIX Protocol Committee commissioned report European FIX User Survey. FIX Antenna was rated on three metrics and received 4.5/5 for "technical performance" 4.5/5 for "functional coverage" and 5/5 for "support staff". In the overall ratings FIX Antenna was top with 4.7/5.

5. FIX Antenna .Net FIX Engine

FIX Antenna .NET has been designed to provide native support of Microsoft .NET technologies enabling quick and easy integration into any custom .NET application. While enabling all the benefits of Microsoft's .NET framework it retains all the benefits of B2BITS class leading FIX engines. The .NET engine delivers performance of over 10,000 messages per second on a single cpu. The .NET benefits include the ability to manipulate messages with the use of class hierarchies, properties and namespaces, XML based documentation for all messages, and the ability to generate structured messages. FIX Antenna .Net provides an extremely easy way to integrate support of the FIX protocol into any .Net application. It is specifically designed to improve the productivity of .Net programmers even if they are novice FIX users.
Features — All features are included as standard no cost options.

6. What is FIXEdge?

FIXEdge FIX Engine is our joint venture product with Sun Microsystems to be sold and supported through the Sun worldwide network. FIXEdge is a fully specified and supported FIX appliance, offering an easy to implement, out of the box solution to the industry's FIX connectivity needs. FIXEdge offers industry leading performance of over 10,000 messages per second and a full high availability specification across 2 Sun LX50 Linux servers for a monthly fee which covers hardware, software, support and all subsequent upgrades to the software and protocol.

APIs: CORBA; MQ Series; Simple Sockets

List price: 2500 USD pcm

FIXEdge was formerly known as FIXRAQ.

7. FIX Engine Performance

FIX Antenna C++, our flagship product is the fastest engine currently available in today's market place. It was recently benchmark tested by Sun Microsystems on an entry level machine (single processor) and has a certified throughput of over 14,000 messages per second. This is an order of magnitude higher than that of our closest competitor on similar hardware and greater than any other benchmark irrespective of the hardware used.

Benchmarking documentation can be found here.

8. What asset classes (Equities, FX, Derivatives, Fixed Income etc.) can I use FIX Antenna to trade?

The FIX Antenna family of engines support all asset classes specified within the FIX protocol. This includes: Equities, Foreign Exchange, Futures, Options and Fixed Income.

9. What versions of the FIX protocol do B2BITS engines support?

All of our commercial engines (Java and C++ and Sun Edition) support versions 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 of the FIX protocol. As part of the support and upgrade package which all our Clients have, we supply upgrades to newer versions of the protocol at no extra charge. This will of course be the case with FIX 4.4 as soon as the final specification appears. This ensures your implementation stays abreast of new developments as they occur, without any extra cost.

10. Platforms

FIX Antenna C++:

  • Win 2000/NT, Linux, Solaris SPARC and Solaris Intel

FIX Antenna Java:

  • Any platform with a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) available

FIXEdge:

  • FIXEdge runs on 2 Sun LX50 Linux servers

11. APIs and Integration Paths

B2BITS offers a variety of APIs and integration paths to its FIX Engines in addition to the engine's native API. You may select a single or multiple API or integration paths. There is no additional charge for delivering or supporting the interface.

The following interfaces are available:

  • Native
  • CORBA
  • MQ Series
  • Simple Sockets
  • JMS
  • JDBC/ODBC
  • SOAP
  • TIB
  • ACTIVE X / COM

12. How much does this cost?

B2BITS operates an annuity model for its' software. The licence fee is included with the annual support, upgrade and maintenance fee. There are no additional fees for different processors, the number of processors, the number of messages, the number of sessions or anything else. And a production instance is a high availability cluster, no double charging.

Contact sales@b2bits.com for a detailed quotation at a price that is lower than any competitors.

B2BITS Testing Services

1. FIX Antenna Certification and Testing Service (FACTS)

The FIX Antenna™ Certification and Testing Service enables trading parties who use the FIX protocol to substantially reduce the time and cost of compatibility testing. FACTS allows sell-side and buy-side firms to quickly and easily detect and mend a full range of problems related to violations of the FIX protocol specification and of application level conventions.

FACTS is a script-based testing service that can be customized to mirror the FIX implementation of any sell side or exchange. It tests both session-level and application-level messages. It is interactive and offers an immediate diagnosis of any problems discovered.

FACTS is ideal for testing compliance to the FIX Protocol Ltd 'expected behaviours' specification. It was designed in conjunction with Kevin Houstoun, at SSB-CitiGroup. Kevin sits on the European Steering Committee of the FIX Protocol organization.

2. Dynamic Auto Regression testing (DART)

DART (Dynamic Auto Regression Testing) is a tool which tests a Sell-Side Firm's own FIX implementation against all the requirements of the FIX Protocol. It also highlights differences in behaviour between iterations of the test such that it may be used as a part of the change management process to ensure that changes to the internal systems do not adversely affect the FIX implementation and interaction with clients. DART is currently in Beta testing with several existing clients.

3. Real-time Exchange for FIX (REEF)

REEF was developed by B2BITS for two main purposes: first to enable free-form testing of client's FIX implementations; second as a training tool for traders. REEF's feature rich environment also fulfils another function — showing the full potential of the FIX Protocol.

  • Works on a matched order book basis
  • Internal market making facility and simulated liquidity
  • Supports all order types specified in the FIX protocol
  • Multicasts IOIs, Quotes, News, Advertisements to all initiators of sessions and redistributes IOIs it receives to all users

Interaction with REEF is through a FIX session and all results are constantly reflected in a GUI interface.

4. Forensic FIX Tools

FIX Eye and FIX Grep are the new generation forensic tools to work with FIX logs. These utilities are the result of many years of experience in FIX support. It is the next generation of log browsers, which go beyond traditional parsers and are equipped with full knowledge of FIX objects and their state management.