Unlocking the Value of Your FIX Logs

Some time you just do not know the value of what you have. Just consider the Spaniards who discarded tons of a mysterious silver-colored mineral while mining for gold in the New World, which later would be known as platinum.

The new software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Cameron Edge sees platinum-quality data hiding in plain sight within FIX engine logs and plans to unlock it with its new FIXinsight analysis platform, which should be announced later this week.

“FIX logs were something that were chucked away at the end of the trading day,” says John Cameron, principal at Cameron Edge. “Some people might store them, but never look at them except when a regulator comes knocking on the door or when clients start shrieking at them.”

The deceptively simple looking offering provides users a way to upload and store their FIX engine logs via a browser connection and then replay their trading activity as well as run various sort of analytics on their stored data.

The true challenge come from the fact that the industry does not have a standard when it comes to the make up of FIX logs.

“A FIX log from one engine doesn’t look like a fix log from another engine,” Cameron explains. “Some have timestamps while others don’t. There might be extra tags or characters. There really is not a standard for logs. Different FIX engines and different implementations will log in different ways.”

No matter what the FIX engine implementation, the platform is capable of extracting the relevant information from the FIX logs from version 4.0 to the latest version of the messaging standard. Cameron Edge achieved this by using XML-based FIX Repository, which is supported by FIX Protocol Limited (FPL), to provide the latest definitions of the messaging standard.

Cameron is quick to point out FIXinsight will display the content of custom fields to the user, but it will not be able to decipher the meaning of the custom fields.

Potential uses for this new capability are almost limitless considering the ubiquity of the FIX messaging protocol.

 “We have a de facto consolidated audit trail, it’s a FIX log,” says Cameron. “Everything that people are discussing that should be in a consolidated audit trail are in a FIX log and you can replay any trading session with that information.”

To encourage use by the industry, Cameron Edge has selected a two-tier pricing structure. The initial tier is free for users who upload up to 10 Kb of data on a daily basis. The paid-tier begins at $200 per month for 50 Kb of uploads and increases for additional upload volumes and registered users.

“We deliberately set the free level at a level where the small buy side or broker, or the average developer can use the tool and have it cost them nothing,” says Cameron, who adds that FPL members will receive double normal upload allowance for each tier.