FIXatdl

It works in tandem with the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol which is the lingua franca of electronic trading in the securities market.

This made life very difficult for the buy-side, and more particularly for their suppliers as adding new algorithms to their trading systems and managing all the different combinations of tags became a significant overhead for their development operations.

The second issue for the market was that each sell-side firm had a specific way they wanted their algorithms to be displayed on the buy-side OMS, with controls in the user interface arranged logically for easy order entry.

Again, this proved a challenge for the buy-side systems vendors, as each new screen for each sell-side broker required dedicated development and testing effort.

Perhaps more importantly, it failed to solve what was the more substantial issue for the market, the complexity for the buy-side vendors resulting from lack of standardisation.

The idea of using an XML structure to describe the presentation of algorithm user interfaces and their accompanying parameters was firstly suggested within the working group by Daniel Clayden, then of JP Morgan Chase in a 2005 forum posting.

In particular, the definition of the data to be transmitted and its presentation on the user interface were tightly bound together, limiting the flexibility sell-side brokers had in defining their algorithms.

The question has often been asked, why doesn’t FIXatdl use an off-the-shelf user interface standard, such as Mozilla’s XUL, Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation or Apache Flex?