FinTech firms reduce trading time to 120 nanoseconds

SolarFlare, Xilinx and LDA Technologies service has reduced ‘tick-to-trade’ latency from 250 nanoseconds.

Several technology firms have teamed up to develop a tool that has reduced ‘tick-to-trade’ latency from 250 nanoseconds to just 120 nanoseconds.

SolarFlare, Xilinx and LDA Technologies explained the reduction in latency improves the queue positions of trades and increases the probability of trades being executed.

The joint service consists of one Solarflare software-defined NIC managing multiple Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGAs running LDA Lightspeed TCP core.

Ahmet Houssein, vice president of marketing at Solarflare, explained seizing opportunities lasting only a fraction of seconds is a mission for electronic trading operations.

“Who wins and who loses is determined by how fast a trader can digest a market feed and place orders,” he said.

Solarflare explained its benchmark for network performance is tick-to-trade latency, which is the time interval between receiving a market tick showing an opportunity to an algorithm, and sending the buy/sell order.

Manoj Roge, director of data center strategy and marketing at Xilinx, explained Xilinx UltraScale FPGAs provide the highest frequency and lowest latency reprogrammable platforms, and are ideal for high-frequency trading applications.

“The results achieved by Solarflare and LDA using these devices clearly demonstrate this value.”

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