Case Study: Proprietary Firm

TT^® Enterprise Solutions

TT’s architecture and delivery model make it easier and faster for us to build solutions that meet our clients’ demands. Not only can we bring new features to market faster, but our open and extendable architecture allows us to deliver broad and deep end-to-end solutions for all client types. Read on to learn how a proprietary trading firm addressed their unique challenges with TT.

Situation and Needs

A proprietary trading group in Chicago developed their own low-latency trading platform specific to their needs and style of trading. They had used the platform exclusively to trade products on CME and deploy their system in CME’s colocation facility in Aurora. They had ideas for using their platform to try out new trading strategies on other exchanges, specifically the Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE), but they didn’t want to invest a great deal of money procuring data center space, IT infrastructure and connectivity to test out their strategies in these unproven markets. They were looking for a solution that didn’t require a big upfront capital investment or long-term commitment so they could test out their ideas.

Solutions and Benefits

Hosting

We built a global network consisting of data centers around the world, and we deploy TT for our customer in these colocation facilities. With our extra capacity and the vast expertise of our internal teams, we’re able to offer infrastructure services in our data centers that include hosting. We proposed a hosting solution in which we procured, configured and installed servers in our space at the NY4 data center, which is colocated with CFE. We charge a nominal installation fee and a monthly hosting fee and allow the prop trading firm to install their trading platform on the servers in our facility for a relatively low cost.

Market Access

Since we already have access to CFE for our platform, we can leverage that connectivity as part of our infrastructure services offering. Our market access consists of market data and order routing. We can provide a customer with an exchange’s raw data feed instead of our normalized feed and they can use it as they see fit. With our order routing access, a firm only needs credentials from an exchange. They don’t have to go through the process of ordering connectivity to an exchange and are not bound by the terms of another contract.

Connectivity

We provide connectivity to enable our infrastructure services customers to access the environment that we’ve built out for them. Additionally, we can carve out bandwidth on our low-latency global network that interconnects all of our data centers and provide that private bandwidth to our infrastructure customers. In this case, the proprietary trading firm needed connectivity from the Aurora data center, where they have their own space, to the NY4 data center, where we were proposing our hosting and exchange access services.