1. High Frequency Trading
Infrastructure and Quality Assurance
Iosif Itkin, Exactpro Systems
20th
January 2014

2. Contents
• Quality Assurance and Risk Assessment
• High Frequency Trading Technology
• Fat Finger Problems
• Flash Crash
• Circuit Breakers
• Facebook IPO
• ABN and ATG on NASDAQ
• Knight Capital Events
• Monitoring Systems
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3. Exactpro Systems Company Overview
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• A specialist firm focused on functional and non
functional testing of securities data distribution,
trading systems, risk management and post-trade
infrastructures
• An independent company incorporated in 2009 with
10 people, now employing over 210 specialists
• A US company registered and head-quartered in San
Rafael, California, with four QA & development
centres in Russia and sales support in the UK
• We build software to verify trading and back-office
systems for exchanges, brokers and other companies
in securities industry
http://linkedin.com/in/iosifitkin

4. Quality Assurance and Risk Assessment
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Minimal

5. Quality Assurance and Risk Assessment
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Minimal Life & Health

6. Quality Assurance and Risk Assessment
Financial Services
Money and Reputation
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Minimal Life & Health

7. Trading System Types
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8. Achieving High Availability
• Minimize the number of faults and the effect/recovery time
of faults in a system
• Avoid a single-point-of-failure by utilizing redundant parts and
rerouting (failover)
• Have a comprehensive monitoring system in place
• Reduce the impact of environmental faults by using UPS and
off-site data mirroring and/or replication provided for "hot"
repair of failed components
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9. Trading Architecture Sample from Cinnober
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10. Ariane 5 First Launch
• 4 June 1996
• Maiden flight of Ariane 5 unmanned missile
• Loss of guidance and attitude information 37 seconds after
ignition Explosion at 3700 meters 3 seconds later
• Number conversion from 64 bits into 16 bits
• Ada language invalid operand error
• The same version of software was used for Ariane 4
• Horizontal velocity appeared to be much higher
• Testing using simulators without SRI itself
• Both primary and secondary systems failed
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11. High Frequency Trading System
• Hundreds of millions of orders per day;
• Micro-bursts with thousands of transactions within
milliseconds;
• Latencies 3,000 times faster than the blink of an eye…
• …and equal to time it takes a flying passenger jet to cover the
distance of 2 cm or light getting from here to Frasne
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12. Brokerage System
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13. Mizuho Securities
• 12 October 2005
• Attempts to sell a single J-Com stock for 610,000 Yen ($5,041)
• Mistakenly price and quantity were swapped
• Risk systems failure:
– Mizuho Securities
– Tokyo Stock Exchange
• Estimated loss $225 millions
• This type of errors is called
Fat Finger
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14. USS Yorktown
• 21 September 1997
• CG-47 Aegis pilot version for “Smart Ship” program
• All systems outage, including propulsion system for 2.5 hours
• Incorrect data entry into Remote Data Base Manager caused
overflow in the database, LAN shutdown and disconnection of
all controlling terminals
• Software defect – division by zero
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15. Fat Finger Order on NASDAQ from ABN AMRO Client
• 18 September 2012, Stockholm. A trader had the intention of
posting a sell order for 5,000 SKF B shares. Due to an input
error with the Client, the order volume field was populated
with a negative value (-5,000)
• Instead of returning an error, the system converted the value
into a random 9-digit figure - 294,962,296
• The Sell Order corresponded to approximately 71 % of the
total outstanding volume in the SKF B share. The Sell Order
resulted in execution of 813,442 shares
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16. Flash Crash
• 6 May 2010, Waddell & Reed hedges exposure in equities
• Algo to sell 75,000 E-mini contracts (~$4.1b) with 9% participation target
• No price or time constraints in the algo, only volume traded during the
previous minute
• Initial selling was absorbed by HFT and arbitrageurs - buy E-mini, sell SPY or
basket of equities. Lack of liquidity and hot-potato exchange between HFT
increased volumes and selling pressure from the algo
• Sharp decline in prices within 5 minutes. Trigger of across the board
volatility interruptions
• Participants are leaving the market, causing liquidity
crisis in equities and execution against stub quotes
• Market recovers within minutes
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17. Limit Order Book
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18. Limit Order Book
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19. Limit Order Book
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20. Limit Order Book
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21. Price Boundaries
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22. Price Boundaries
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23. Price Boundaries
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24. Price Boundaries
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25. Circuit Breaker
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26. Circuit Breaker
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27. Circuit Breaker
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28. Circuit Breaker
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29. Circuit Breaker
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30. Facebook IPO
• 18 May 2012, NASDAQ, One of the largest IPOs in history
• Secondary trading is preceded by a designate Display Only Period (DOP)
• Multi-component architecture that included Matching Engine, IPO Cross
Application and Execution Application
• At the end of the DOP, NASDAQ’s “IPO Cross Application” analyzes all of
the buy and sell orders to determine the price at which the largest
number of shares will trade and then NASDAQ’s matching engine
matches buy and sell orders at that price. Usually takes 1-2 ms
• NASDAQ allowed orders to be cancelled at any time up until the end of
the DOP – including the very brief interval during which the IPO cross
price is calculated. After calculation is completed the system performed
orders validation check between ME and “IPO Cross Application”. If any of
the orders were cancelled after the start of the cross, the system will have
to repeat the calculation
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31. Facebook IPO
• Over 496k orders participated in the cross and its duration exceeded
20ms
• Order cancellation arrived during this period and application had to
repeat the calculation. Two more cancellations arrived during the second
iteration and four more during the third
• IPO Cross Application went into infinite loop at 11:05
• NASDAQ team switched off validation check on the secondary system and
performed failover 25 minutes after the start of the loop
• Unknown at that moment 38k orders submitted between 11:11 and 11:30
were stuck and had not participated in the uncross. It created another
discrepancy, this time with Execution App and Members who were not
able to receive confirmation for orders executed in the cross until 13:50
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32. ABN and ATG Auction Uncross Problem on NASDAQ
• 28 August 2013 the SEB A share opened significantly lower
than on the previous day. The opening price was 51.80, which
was around 24% lower than the closing price
• A contributing factor was trading performed during the
opening auction by Algorithmic Trading Group (ATG), using a
certain algorithm that it had developed through Sponsored
Access arrangements with ABN Amro Clearing Bank
• Because of a shortcoming of the said algorithm, it registered,
amended and cancelled the orders as soon as the limit price
was equal or cross the equilibrium price of the order book
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33. Knight Capital Events
• 1 August 2012, USA
• Knight Capital – one of the most successful HFT firms
• Implemented changes related to Retail Liquidity Program в
NYSE
• SMARS – ultra-fast order router
• Source code responsible for the legacy functionality
PowerPeg
• 212 parent orders, millions child orders
• Accumulated loss – $460m or $170k/sec
• Incorrectly configured risk systems
• Deployment on 7 servers instead of 8…
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34. North American Blackout
• 14 August 2003, USA and Canada
• Cascade power outage
• Race conditions resulted in buffer overflow in alerting system
• Should operators disconnected 4% of the overall load the
losses estimated to be $10b could have been avoided
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35. Market Surveillance and Monitoring
• Process all events
• Aggregate them
• Look for patterns using
flexible rules
• Replay for Investigation
• Store everything as
evidence
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36. Thank You
• Program analysis
• Software verification
• Financial models validation
• Load distribution modeling
• Research of risk controls and circuit breakers
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http://tmpaconf.org

37. References
• A Cinnober white paper on: Latency October 2009 update
• SEC Release No. 34-69655 / May 29, 2013
• SEC Release No. 34-70694 / October 16, 2013
• NASDAQ OMX Stockholm Disciplinary Committee DECISION 2013-02-21
• NASDAQ OMX Stockholm Disciplinary Committee DECISION 2014-01-13
• Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010
• The Future of Computer Trading in Financial Markets
• TMPA-2013: Tools & Methods of Program Analysis
• Software Horror Stories
• Slide Share - http://www.slideshare.net/IosifItkin
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