David Snowdon

In the 2010s, two Sydney-based companies pioneered the commercialization of what is now a core technology in financial trading: Layer 1 switching. Join us as David Snowdon, co-founder and CTO of one of those firms, will recount the journey from concept to deployment, including the technical and business challenges along the way.

Behind every trade is a complex stack of exchange technology tuned for extreme performance. In this session, experts who build exchange platforms will sit down with technologists from the trading industry to explore the engineering behind modern market systems—from deterministic networking and cable length equalization to ultra-low-latency market data delivery and next-generation matching engine architectures.

As trading systems chase ever-lower latencies, ensuring fairness in market data and market access has become a complex technical challenge. While cable length equalization has dominated fairness debates, today’s concerns extend to switch architectures, cross-connects, port-level latency differences, and communication strategies—all of which can offer participants nano and picosecond-level advantages.

Migration to 25G, 40G, and 100G Ethernet is in full swing among enterprises and cloud providers, but exchange connections and trading infrastructures have resolutely remained at or below a 10G ceiling. It is tempting to believe this will always be so.

Migration to 25G, 40G, and 100G Ethernet is in full swing among enterprises and cloud providers, but exchange connections and trading infrastructures have resolutely remained at or below a 10G ceiling. It is tempting to believe this will always be so.

Migration to 25G, 40G, and 100G Ethernet is in full swing among enterprises and cloud providers, but exchange connections and trading infrastructures have resolutely remained at or below a 10G ceiling. It is tempting to believe this will always be so.

Migration to 25G, 40G, and 100G Ethernet is in full swing among enterprises and cloud providers, but exchange connections and trading infrastructures have resolutely remained at or below a 10G ceiling. It is tempting to believe this will always be so.

FSI software engineers have long benefited from abundant open-source projects, but firmware engineers still have few good options. This was unsurprising when the developer community was small, but now that FPGA development is widespread in finance and other industries, the time is ripe for change.

FSI software engineers have long benefited from abundant open-source projects, but firmware engineers still have few good options. This was unsurprising when the developer community was small, but now that FPGA development is widespread in finance and other industries, the time is ripe for change.

In the 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was signed, the way we’ve developed and deployed software code has improved by leaps and bounds. Features can get out the door quickly while remaining reliable.

No one would characterize today’s high-performance trading systems as “simple”. The scope of connectivity gets wider every day, latency/jitter tolerances continue to shrink, and mission-critical infrastructure continues to morph (think innovative low-latency switches, container orchestration, software-defined everything, microservices, etc.).

As we've discussed many times at STAC, liquid markets have been in a positive-feedback loop between determinism and latency for the last several years. In an effort to improve fairness, exchanges and other trading venues have become more deterministic, increasing the likelihood that orders that arrive first are executed first.

As we've discussed many times at STAC, liquid markets have been in a positive-feedback loop between determinism and latency for the last several years. In an effort to improve fairness, exchanges and other trading venues have become more deterministic, increasing the likelihood that orders that arrive first are executed first.

Maintaining event intelligence in electronic trading continues to get more challenging. Understanding events with clarity requires capturing those events, understanding exactly when they happened, and pulling them into meaningful analysis, whether that’s for operations management or strategy development and backtesting.

Maintaining event intelligence in electronic trading continues to get more challenging. Understanding events with clarity requires capturing those events, understanding exactly when they happened, and pulling them into meaningful analysis, whether that’s for operations management or strategy development and backtesting.

Wire capture is a crucial element of trading systems today, with the resulting data serving as a source not only for operational monitoring but also for the development and backtesting of trading strategies. And like other parts of a trading system, capture architectures can't stand still.