Participants in today’s Capital Markets, consume an ever growing volume of real-time data
from multiple feeds in order to accurately report price and trade-related data for a range of
financial instruments.
Traders, Investors and Regulators, rely on the integrity of market feeds, to execute regulatory compliant
trades in equities, fixed-income products, derivatives and currencies and to maintain market stability.
It is therefore important that feed providers develop a comprehensive test strategy for feed verification
that detects any anomalies under all trading conditions.
Does your feed test strategy cover dynamic high load conditions?
The answer is probably – NO.
Most strategies for feed testing employ a functional test, covering typical trading scenarios. These test
setups are usually comprised of a small number of paired Buy/Sell counter-parties and the trade
message flows are strictly time-lined, with the low submission rates, to ensure synchronization of trade
actions and the repeatability of order matching.
These functional tests are not designed to cover high load conditions.
Why are “High Load” tests difficult to setup?
In a true production environment, the output from Market Feeds is non-predictive.
The output of a feed will have a different message sequence and data content, even if, the trade orders
for each trading session are replayed with the same timed sequence. This is due to the effect of
competing (asynchronous) trading actions from multiple client sessions leading to a different order of
trade matching between counter-parties. The order of matching is affected by factors such as, order
submission rates and the number of clients competing for the same trade.
Since the feed is non-predictive, comparing it output against a static data reference is not a feasible test
setup under high load conditions. The sequence of trades changes and the message content (i.e. price,
volume, etc.) varies between each test run.
This presents a significant challenge to the development of a comprehensive test strategy.
Introducing “Adaptive Testing” for Market Feeds
Adaptive testing uses trade information (i.e. Drop-Copy, Execution Reports, etc.) from within the trading
system, sourced in real-time, to create a dynamic reference stream to verify the messages on the feed
under test.
What differentiates adaptive testing from other approaches is the real-time nature of the reference
data, used to compare both feed message sequence and content.
Single Market Feed test setup covers all trade flow scenarios.
This test technique automatically adapts to different trade message input stimulus without the test
engineer having to change the feed test setup. A single adaptive test setup adjusts to any front-end test
scenario presented to the trading system and automatically verifies that the back-end feed output is
correct.
Adaptive testing can be used to support real-time monitoring of data feeds in both development and
production environments – guarding against message drop-outs, malformed messages and inconsistent
data.
Inceptrum has incorporated this adaptive technique in its new test tool, called Feed Comparator
(“FEEDCMP”) for market data, regulatory and drop-copy feeds.
To learn more about data feed testing, follow the link to Feed Comparator (“FEEDCMP”)
at www.inceptrum.com/en/feedcmp-2/
About INCEPTRUM
INCEPTRUM Technologies Inc. is a Canadian privately held company, located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Providing creative, leading-edge, low data latency solutions for the financial industry.
For more information, visit www.inceptrum.com.
Media Contact:
Ian Hughes,
Dir. Business Development,
Inceptrum Technologies Inc.
ian.hughes@inceptrum.com
1-613.699.2016 (direct)
1-877.763.6996 x103 (toll-free)