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• Finance #1 (real time data collection)
• Finance #2 (portfolios)
• freedb–database loader (music CD database)
• Wireless network installation

Finance #1 (real time data collection)

Development of software systems for a start–up company. The company was set up to provide financial market software products and consultancy services.

• To develop software products to sell to financial institutions such as investment banks and fund management companies.
• To participate in sales and marketing presentations as well as technical discussions where necessary.
• To provide technical support, software updates and enhancements to clients with support contracts.

• Software: C++ programming language
• Software: C programming language
• Software: Microsoft Visual Studio 6 Professional Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• Software: Sun Microsystems Forte C++ compiler
• Software: IBM Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) Database and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Software: IBM IDS TimeSeries / Real–Time Loader DataBlades
• Software: IBM IDS Structured Query Language (SQL)
• Software: Financial data distribution platform APIs
• Hardware / Operating System: PC – Microsoft Windows NT / 2000 Professional
• Hardware / Operating System: Servers / clusters – Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
• Hardware / Operating System: Sun Microsystems servers / Solaris 2.6 & 8

Background

• Many financial institutions have specialist equipment (such as satellite dishes, leased lines and computer servers) that allow them to receive details of financial transactions which have taken place anywhere in the world.
• Transactions take place at securities exchanges and involve financial securities or "instruments" (for example currencies, stocks and shares, bonds).
• Each instrument involved in a transaction has a number of "attributes" associated with it, such as the number of shares sold or the price they were sold for.
• The specialist equipment (data distribution platform) used to deliver the transaction information is provided by a financial market data provider.
• Each data provider has application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used by software developers to read information (for example trades and quotes) from the data distribution platform.
• Collected market data is used for many tasks, such as risk management and portfolio valuation.

Project details

• We worked with the company over a four year period.
• We developed software systems to capture published financial market data on both a continuous ("tick") and periodic ("snapshot") basis.
• The data collected was stored in a database.
• We provided support to three live city clients over a three and a half year period.
• We created a specialised high–speed tick capture and storage system during an onsite trial. The trial involved 17,000 financial instruments and covered financial exchanges such as NASDAQ, NYSE and the London Stock Exchange. At times of peak activity the system had to cope with over 1,000 updates every second.