Direct-access and professional trading platforms
Active traders and prop desks often trade through direct-access platforms built for speed and routing control. Most of them offer an API or FIX connection for automated order entry. We build systems that sit alongside these platforms: automated entries from your rules, risk layers a desk can enforce, and tools that manage many accounts at once.
- Your rules or signalsfrom your models or scanners
- Your enginerisk layer, routing logic
- Platform API or FIXSterling, Takion, TT and others
- Desk accountsper-trader and per-account limits
Platforms we have built on
- Sterling Trader Pro
- Takion
- Lightspeed
- Lime
- Trading Technologies (TT)
- DAS Trader Pro
What desks ask us for
- Automated order entry from your models or scanners, with the routing choices you specify.
- A desk risk layer: per-trader and per-account limits, loss limits and position caps enforced before orders leave.
- Many accounts at once, with monitoring that shows the whole desk on one screen.
- FIX connectivity where the platform or broker offers it. We have built FIX connections to Interactive Brokers, to an NSE-registered broker in India and for a prop trading desk in India.
For full OMS and EMS work, see institutional trading systems, and for the shape of a complete desk system, our reference architecture for a small prop desk.
An example from our work
On Sterling Trader Pro we built a Windows app on Sterling’s official COM API: live quotes, the client’s orders including trailing orders, and every confirmation, rejection, update and fill matched back to the order that caused it and logged. A separate backtester replays history with the same order logic. Built in C# in 2019, and later extended to Interactive Brokers.
Client names and results are withheld. This describes the engineering only.
We build software that runs your strategy. We don’t supply strategies or signals, we don’t manage money, and we make no claim about how any strategy performs. The rules and every trading decision stay yours.
Common questions
- Can you automate order entry on Sterling or Takion?
- Yes. Both offer programmatic order entry, and we build systems that place orders from your rules with your risk checks in front of every order.
- Can you enforce risk limits across a whole desk?
- Yes. A central risk layer can hold limits per trader and per account, check every order before it leaves, and show the desk’s exposure in one place.