About

What this is

Electronic Trading Hub is a working notebook on how electronic trading systems get built, and where they break. It has been publishing since April 2016. There are 136 articles here on venue and exchange architecture, market microstructure, execution quality, low latency infrastructure, market making models, eFX, and the C++ underneath all of it.

The reader I write for is the person who has to make the decision and then live with it. A CTO sizing a build. A head of trading who cannot explain a slippage number to the investment committee. An engineer who has been handed a matching engine and a date.

Mission

Most published material on high frequency trading is either vendor marketing or mystique, and neither one helps you build anything.

This site exists to close that gap. Describe the mechanism plainly, attach the numbers, name the failure mode, and put a cost on the decisions that usually get made on instinct. Where I have seen something fail on a live desk, I say so, including when it was my own call.

The standard I hold articles to: if it could not survive being read by the person who runs the system it describes, it does not go up.

Goal

A reference practitioners come back to, rather than a feed.

Articles here are written to stay useful two years after publication, which is why they lean on mechanism and measurement instead of whatever moved last week. The largest sections are electronic trading, infrastructure, HFT, and market microstructure.

What success looks like: an architect facing a decision finds the article, gets a specific answer, and ships a better system than they would have otherwise.

About the author

Electronic Trading Hub is written by Ariel Silahian. He has spent 30+ years in institutional electronic trading across the buy and sell side, wrote “C++ High Performance for Financial Systems” (Packt), and created VisualHFT, the open-source microstructure analytics stack.