InfoSphere Streams for Smarter Capital Markets

The financial services industry worldwide is at an inflexion point. Given the technological advancements in market data delivery technologies, many institutions and their trading operations are now able to run program trading operations round the clock. But, they remain extremely challenged in their ability to handle and analyze growing market data volume and throughput rates in order to make trading decisions with extremely low latencies. In addition, tight control over the trading operations to prevent risky trades has become a pressing requirement for all institutions after the financial meltdown that world has seen in recent times.

For financial institutions involved in trading operations, InfoSphere Streams with its technological superiority provides several significant advantages over what traditional CEP (Complex Event Processing) vendors could offer in this space:

A highly scalable platform to handle vast amounts of market data in real time and make trade recommendations with microsecond latencies
A highly flexible platform that can support extremely powerful proprietary trading strategies
Can easily scale up and down to ‘000s of nodes seamlessly in runtime
Includes built-in connectivity to widely used market data sources and industry wide used centralized systems:
- Connectivity to Financial Information eXchange (FIX) version 4 gateways for order execution, confirmation, and other tasks performed through the FIX protocol
- Connectivity to WebSphere Front Office platform, including support for its Reliable Multicast Messaging (RMM) option for consumption of market data feeds, use of order books, and access to other functions provided by WebSphere Front Office
Supports WebSphere MQ Low-Latency Messaging (LLM) to provide state of the art performance
Contains Built-in operators to integrate Streams applications with QuantLib – A commonly used tool within trading operations
Includes built-in accelerator analytics out of the box that help calculate equity option derivative values commonly referred to as "Greeks"
Includes a set of library functions that help calculate theoretical put and call option values based on Black-Scholes options valuation models
Provides a flexible platform to integrate liquidity management and risk control and monitoring logic within the trading application

Typical Applications of InfoSphere Streams in the financial markets space include:

Real Time Market data ingestion and management
Real Time decision support for Equities, Derivates, Commodity and Forex trading
Incorporate additional contextual awareness (news, weather etc) into trading decision
Real Time cross asset pricing
Continuous real time trade monitoring to identify fraudulent trading
Real Time Cross Asset across trading desks and geographies for a continuous enterprise risk level and liquidity management