As a bank or broker-dealer, there are really only two ways to grow your business. You can grow organically by offering new trading functionality and major sales drives, or you can grow inorganically through acquisition. The latter has been the strategy of choice for large trading firms over the past…

At FixSpec, we talk about automation A LOT. There is a simple reason for this — we believe that it will become a key competitive factor for trading firms over the next few years with other factors such as latency becoming largely irrelevant for most. Trading services which offer customers…

I spend far more time thinking and talking about FIX documentation than… well pretty much anybody I’ve ever met. Despite being an outwardly-boring subject that is just too easy to swat away with objections like “we haven’t updated our FIX documents in donkey’s years” or “we’ve probably already onboarded all…

For almost a decade now, I’ve been evangelizing to people working in FIX connectivity — a niche API format within financial services — about a better way of working. Something that will free them from the daily drudgery of low-value tasks and open up a better, more automated future. What’s Going Wrong? At…

In other posts in this series, I’ve introduced some of the key concepts of the FIX protocol, as well as some of the history. In this article, I’d like to dive into the basics of how the protocol itself works. What is a FIX Engine? Where Does It Sit? First of all, we need to talk about an important…

In this article, I’d like to shine a light on an area of FIX that seems to be quite confused in people’s minds, and that is the “security” (or not) of FIX specifications. Current Perspectives The background to this is that we conducted some market research in December 2020 in which we…

If you are interested in financial markets, then you may have come across references to the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol. So what is it, and why is it so important? Let’s start with a bit of history. 27 October 1986 was a pivotal day in the history of the…

One of the trends that we are seeing with more recent trading venues (which tend to be crypto exchanges), is that they are starting to offer both REST/Websocket and FIX interfaces. You might be asking why have both, and what’s the difference between them? I’ll assume here that if you…

I write this on 23rd September 2019, the day of UN Climate Action Summit. In recent days and weeks, we’ve seen worldwide protests as millions take to the streets to demand action to tackle climate change. Will it fall on deaf ears? Unfortunately it may. And that’s not good enough. …