Trading system architecture and infrastructure
The right infrastructure for a trading system depends entirely on what the system does. We match one to the other, so you get the speed, latency and connectivity your strategy needs, and you do not pay for the parts it does not.
One idea: match the infrastructure to the workload
Most advice about trading infrastructure is really advertising for expensive hardware. The honest picture is simpler. Some strategies need serious infrastructure, and most do not, and the whole skill is knowing which is which and building accordingly. Overbuild and you burn money every month on speed you never use. Underbuild and the system falls over when it matters. The goal is to sit exactly where your workload needs you to.
Light workloads should run cheap
A positional, trend or fundamental strategy trades slowly, so it asks almost nothing of the machine underneath it. A system like that runs happily on a small cloud instance, even across hundreds of tickers, for a few dollars a month. If someone is quoting you dedicated servers for a strategy like this, they are selling you something you do not need. This is the same honesty we bring on the market-data engineering side, where the right answer is often cheaper than people expect.
Heavy workloads earn their infrastructure
At the other end, strategies where milliseconds decide the result, scalping and some kinds of arbitrage, genuinely need low-latency, high-performance infrastructure, and sometimes co-location next to the exchange. That is real, and where it is justified we design for it properly. The point is that it is justified by the workload, not assumed by default. Between the two sit the scanner-heavy and intraday systems that need real compute and fast data, but not the last microsecond.
What we actually do
We look at what your strategy really requires, how often it trades, how much data it consumes, and how much a delay actually costs it, and then we design the architecture to fit. That means picking cloud or dedicated hardware, sizing it to the real workload rather than a worst case that never happens, and keeping the running cost down without giving up the speed, latency or connectivity that matters. It is the architecture behind our execution engines and multi-broker platforms, and it is where our custom software work starts.
Common questions
- Do I need co-location or low-latency infrastructure?
- Usually not. Co-location and high-performance infrastructure matter for latency-sensitive work like scalping and arbitrage. Most strategies, including positional, trend and fundamental ones, run perfectly well on ordinary cloud infrastructure. We tell you honestly which side of that line you are on, rather than selling you speed you will never use.
- Cloud or on-premise?
- It depends on the workload and your constraints. Cloud is the right default for most systems: it is cheap, reliable and easy to scale. Some latency-sensitive or data-heavy cases justify dedicated or co-located hardware. We design for the one your strategy needs, and we are clear about the trade-offs.
- How do you keep operating cost under control?
- By sizing the infrastructure to the actual workload, not to a worst case that never happens. A strategy trading a few times an hour does not need a high-performance server running around the clock. We architect the system so it is fast enough where it matters and cheap everywhere else.