News Blue Trading Systems Blog, Events, and Highlights

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Published: 20 November 2018

During this week of giving thanks, we want to take this opportunity to let you know we are grateful for the opportunity to work with you. We hope you and your family have a Happy Thanksgiving and great start to the holiday season.

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Published: 15 November 2018

At the 34th Annual Futures Industry Association's (FIA) Futures and Options Expo in Chicago, our own Kevin Darby spoke on a panel looking at Open Source and Interoperability on the Trading Desk.  Joined by expert panelists from Hehmeyer Trading + Investments, QuantConnect and GreenKey Technologies; the group discussed how open source software can lead to increased innovation.  If you missed it, we have provided a re-cap here and the FIA recording here. 

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Published: 30 October 2018

We know that professional traders make their living using our software and believe they deserve every advantage we can give them. From privacy over proprietary information, control over their data and lowest latency software; we provide speed sensitive traders with the fastest vendor solution available. In this video we invite you to learn more about our roots in options, our expansion into futures and the specialists behind the BTS software.

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Published: 23 October 2018

Managing Partner Kevin Darby spoke on a panel last week at FIA Expo exploring Open Source and Interoperability on the Trading Desk. Joined by Brian Peterson at Hehmeyer Trading + Investments, Jared Broad from QuantConnect, Tom Schady from GreenKey Technologies and moderated by Greg Wood from FIA; the group discussed how open source software can lead to increased innovation. If you missed it, below is a re-cap of the discussion.

What is Open Source Software (OSS)?

Many people don’t realize that they use open source software in their everyday lives. For instance, OSS serves as the core of both Android (Linux) and iOS (Darwin) phone operating systems, and most websites are served from Linux servers.

Sharing source code originated at Universities with students and academics sharing software. Later, open source licenses enabled software to be shared more widely. OSS leverages wide communities to build features and fix errors rapidly. For example, all software code has a certain number of errors or bugs, but more eyes on the code means less bugs in the the software.

Interoperability

Open source software can also provide protocols and data format standards that enable communication between systems, which is called interoperability. BTS uses Google’s protocol buffers within its system and API to standardize communication between the client front end, the server, and with custom programs developed by traders.

Applications are often written in layers, allowing open source and proprietary code to coexist in in the same system. With these layers, some parts can be designed to be interchangeable; enabling interoperability with many different APIs and standards. FIX is a good example where one system may need to communicate with many, often incompatible versions; building communication layers allows translations from each FIX dialect into a consistent form used by the system.

Judicious use of OSS can reduce friction in interoperation between different systems and speed up development. For example, BTS uses the Boost C++ libraries for many common functions which we would otherwise have to write ourselves.

Security

A common concern about OSS is that the code is visible and an attacker may be able to find and exploit a security vulnerability. However widespread community security evaluations prove that when more people have access to code, more issues are fixed. The panel emphasized that 20,000 people will see more issues than 20 people.

Also, security vulnerabilities are fixed quickly because there is constant and consistent peer review. Bounties; where a company pays to be informed of a security hole, can significantly improve the number of issues found.

There are also tools which search for code known to contain vulnerabilities in publicly available source code such as those used by Github.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while there are security and backwards compatibility concerns with Open Source Software, the panel largely believed in its ability to foster Interoperability and innovation and to address bugs and security flaws quickly.

If you would like to learn more about how Blue Trading Systems designs their software and other research projects ongoing at the firm, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..