NYC Hedge Fund Returns To Connamara After 10 Years For A New Ultra-Low Latency Solution

A mid-sized New York City hedge fund that manages assets on behalf of foundations, pension funds, and other institutional and individual investors was looking to expand the features of its existing trading platform.

This platform was the very same that Connamara had previously designed, created, and supported for over a decade. Thanks to our team’s complete foresight into future innovations and flexible build, this software not only stood the test of time but was also entirely customizable for the client’s needs.

The firm came to Connamara with a new idea: could our engineering team build an ultra-low latency algorithmic equity trading platform that could access global metadata for control (risk management, ticket marking, restrictions, locates) and advise changing trading positions? Could Connamara make this proof-of-concept quickly, with a launch date of less than a year?

The hedge fund came to Connamara with this strategic project, not just because of our past success with FIX protocol and delivering shared-memory-based systems but because of our rigorous adherence to test-driven development and our knowledge of the C programming language and ZeroMQ.

Despite these ambitious latency goals that required tradeoffs to avoid a feedback bottleneck, Connamara proposed an innovative solution that used global data storage in a custom shared memory segment cache, queried at the trading engine applications’ convenience. The solution enabled algo-level and firm-wide querying of positions, locates, instruments, and trading limits, at local ultra-low latency. Ultimately, eventual consistency was reached globally.

A project that could have taken this firm over a year to develop in-house, depleting resources and time from an inexperienced team, took just under seven months to launch, thanks to Connamara.

On the first day of production, the in-house Technical Lead remarked on the platform’s perfect report card: “Final tally: 104,670 messages, no errors. I’m declaring Day 1 a success. Thanks for writing solid code!” But Connamara’s developers weren’t surprised at all; flawless launches are something our team has come to expect.