FIX Protocol Limited (FPL) has released the FIX Adapted STreaming (FAST) Protocol Specification Version 1.1, which is recommended for adoption by the FPL Market Data Optimisation Working Group, the team responsible for the development of FAST. It is now publicly available and can be downloaded from FPL’s website at www.fixprotocol.org/fast.
The FAST Protocol is a data compaction methodology that has been developed in response to ever-increasing electronic trading volumes and market data messaging rates. By leveraging implicit tagging, field encoding and binary representation of data, the FAST Protocol optimises communication in the electronic exchange of financial data, says FPL. Tests conducted on the FAST Protocol with the support of industry sponsors demonstrated that it is capable of reducing message size and bandwidth utilisation by compressing FIX data feeds by up to 90% without having a negative impact on latency.