FIX Simulator for Development and Testing

What is a FIX Simulator?

The FIX protocol is an open and free specification maintained by the FIX Trading Community. Since 1992, the FIX protocol organization has promoted and enhanced the specification that enables the securities trading industry to exchange financial transactions (orders, executions) and other messaging between trading systems. FIX has been extremely successful in the global markets.

If you are building your own trading system (or using a vendor's solution) having a testing / development environment is crucial for ensuring performance and proper functionality. A FIX Simulator provides you the counter side to your trades in a testing environment.

If you are on the "buy side" (e.g. investment manager) a FIX simulator of a broker/dealer is needed to route your orders to for execution. A FIX simulator will provide you with the ability to manage all possibilities for those trades. This includes order rejections, acknowledgements, partial fills, cancel/corrects, done for day, and many more states.

If you are on the "sell side" (e.g. broker/dealer), having a FIX simulator connect into your service as a client and send orders helps ensure your production ready ability to take trades. A well designed FIX simulator can make multiple connections, submit orders, initiate cancels, and initiate modification requests.

Why do I need a FIX Simulator?

Having a robust FIX simulator provides reliable testing to ensure your trading system can handle not just the standard workflows of trading, but also the tech side of integrations like FIX customizations, reliable message delivery, resequencing for message recovery, and handling high volumes of messaging.

A FIX simulator is needed not only in the development of a trading system, but in perpetuity as your system expands, scales, and increases in scope. The common areas of needs are for:

• Development - software developers building out trading integrations.

• Quality Assurance - testers who ensure robustness and reliability of the trading system.

• Support - personnel who provide support and troubleshooting of production issues.

• Sales/Marketing - for demos of trading solutions to see real world like experiences

FIX Simulator Options

There are a few ways to implement a FIX testing environment.

Build your own

Building your own FIX simulator is a costly expenditure for most firms. You'd be spending development resources to simulate the others side of your trading. This adds another internal software project to maintain, which will run significant costs and require expertise going forward. While this gives you control over what to build, overall cost considerations are needed.

Using a Broker/Dealer's Test Environment

Sometimes a trading partner will provide you access to a test environment. While this might meet the simple requirement to ensure compatibility with this one vendor, it will not help with other workflows. You are also limited to the support they offer in terms of controlling which workflows can be simulated. Another complaint we've seen is the system isn't always reliable and often requires employees at other firm to take action on trades.

Using a Vendor Solution

A vendor solution like FIXSIM provides you with years of expertise and scalability of testing. With a SaaS based solution, there is no need to maintain your own testing hardware. You can simply connect your FIX enabled application to FIXSIM and use our web portal to configure, monitor, and take action on your trading. FIXSIM supports all versions of FIX and trading workflows, allowing you to focus on improving your system and business.

The Power and Flexibility of FIXSIM

Hosted Solution

Nothing to download, install, or maintain! Having an on-demand provides you with reliable access to an ever growing solution. Simply connect your FIX engine with your FIXSIM account and trade from anywhere. We provide the scalability you need for testing.

Customizations

Customized tags/values are often needed with implementing a FIX session. FIXSIM provides flexibility to support custom tags and messages required by vendors. FIXSIM can also support custom QuickFIX Data Dictionaries that can be uploaded for any session.

Manual User Workflows

With the FIXSIM portal, users are empowered to configure FIX sessions and set default behaviors to meet their testing requirements. See trades sent to FIXSIM and take action on them including acknowledgements, rejections, partial executions, status updates, cancellations, and more. Recreate production issues by replaying FIX messages within FIXSIM.

Automated Testing

Configure rules within FIXSIM to automate your most common workflows. For example, with our Rule Builder you can configure a session to reject trades greater than 5000 shares, or partial fill NVDIA orders, or any other combination of trading events.

FIXSIM has an OpenAPI/Swagger interface to allow you to control FIXSIM directly from your application or CLI. Automate workflows using your own programming language.

Summary

Having many years experience of FIX Protocol development, integrations, and support has shown the crucial need for a FIX testing environment. FIXSIM was created based on the need for our own firm, Gamma Three Trading, of a FIX Simulator. Not only are we the vendor of FIXSIM, we are also users to test our own trading infrastructure.