Book Image

Developing High-Frequency Trading Systems

By : Sebastien Donadio, Sourav Ghosh, Romain Rossier
5 (1)
Book Image

Developing High-Frequency Trading Systems

5 (1)
By: Sebastien Donadio, Sourav Ghosh, Romain Rossier

Overview of this book

The world of trading markets is complex, but it can be made easier with technology. Sure, you know how to code, but where do you start? What programming language do you use? How do you solve the problem of latency? This book answers all these questions. It will help you navigate the world of algorithmic trading and show you how to build a high-frequency trading (HFT) system from complex technological components, supported by accurate data. Starting off with an introduction to HFT, exchanges, and the critical components of a trading system, this book quickly moves on to the nitty-gritty of optimizing hardware and your operating system for low-latency trading, such as bypassing the kernel, memory allocation, and the danger of context switching. Monitoring your system’s performance is vital, so you’ll also focus on logging and statistics. As you move beyond the traditional HFT programming languages, such as C++ and Java, you’ll learn how to use Python to achieve high levels of performance. And what book on trading is complete without diving into cryptocurrency? This guide delivers on that front as well, teaching how to perform high-frequency crypto trading with confidence. By the end of this trading book, you’ll be ready to take on the markets with HFT systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Trading Strategies, Trading Systems, and Exchanges
5
Part 2: How to Architect a High-Frequency Trading System
10
Part 3: Implementation of a High-Frequency Trading System

Python and C++ for HFT

As we showed in the previous section, Python is too slow to be adequate for high-frequency trading. C++ is much faster and is the language of choice to get low latency. We are presenting in this section a means to integrate the two languages to unify both worlds. On one side, Python gives the developers ease and flexibility, and on the other side, C++ allows code to reach high performance and low latencies. In HFT, we need to have quantitative researchers and programmers build HFT strategies to run in the production environment. Having a Python ecosystem capable of using C++ libraries will allow quants (quantitative traders) to focus on their research and deploy code in production without the need for other resources. We will explain how to provide a standard interface to different C/C++ libraries. These C/C++ libraries will become Python modules. In other words, we will use them as dynamic libraries loaded in memory when we need them.

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