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Phase Finds Itself A High Frequency Trading Tool
Phase Finds Itself A High Frequency Trading Tool
November 16, 2009
In summer of 2007, investment manager PhaseCapital was seeking a complex event processing solution for implementing several latency-sensitive components of its proprietary execution management system.
The Boston-based firm, which manages a pooled investment vehicle that employs systematic high frequency trading, did not want to engineer itself such a complicated piece of analytical software, which works through large amounts of incoming data and investing scenarios in an instant.
"We want to spend the most time we can on our highest value-add activities," said PhaseCapital CEO and co-founder Eric Pritchett. "[For PhaseCap,] those are idea generation and testing of alpha generating ideas, as well as risk management and portfolio optimization."
To Pritchett and his team, that meant finding a way to analyze complex events that could be implemented quickly, but could also be customized to PhaseCap's demands. It found the speed it needed from Lexington, Mass.-based CEP technology provider StreamBase.
Since launching live trading in April 2009, PhaseCapital has been using the StreamBase Complex Event Processing Platform to handle and scrub market data from multiple execution venues and supply data to various components of the firm's proprietary EMS. The platform allows customers to create, test, and deploy CEP applications in a matter of weeks, according to StreamBase CTO Richard Tibbetts.
The core of the StreamBase platform was first developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Dr. Mike Stonebraker, who founded StreamBase in 2003.
"If we were going to bring a platform in and substitute that platform from our own engineering efforts, we had to be convinced that the technology we were bringing in was high quality and maintainable," said Pritchett.
