Recently in The Cloud Category

The Good News

Today you can readily port your current quantitative, algorithmic and automated trade platforms over to The Cloud.

The Bad News

Your trading platform's current architecture will not automatically allow you to take advantage of the massive processing power that The Cloud avails of itself.

The biggest challenge is that proprietary strategies or algorithms will require an additional translation to be executed so that your algorithmic instructions can be parsed out to multiple processors simultaneously.

Your current platform does not have this instruction set embedded in it....Bummer.

We will be publishing a post shortly on this and will give you an overview of two different approaches to solving this problem either via an ad hoc overlay of parsing services or from a code base that was built from the ground up with parallel processing in mind.

More Bad News

Cloud Based Historical Tick Data Stores for back-testing are not yet online.

The first offerings will be offered not by data vendors, or the exchanges, but as a service available only by proprietary Cloud based algo/quant trading platforms - with access to the Historical Tick Data store only by their own platform using their own API.

What's Next?

We are currently speaking with trading software vendors, data vendors and exchanges about their intended Cloud Tick Data Store offerings and will be publishing a post on the state of their upcoming offerings and their pros and cons.

Where's the Sunshine?

Though the infrastructure and the technology to enable The Cloud today is here today the Algo/Quant tool-kits and their supporting services are not yet in place....But the first offerings are entering Beta as we speak.

So now is the time to start rolling up your sleeves, to start figuring out how best to lean into The Cloud to improve your trading organization and have some fun with a new technology.

If you have any facet of a Cloud Trading offering, either in development, beta or production, please feel free to ping us to chat.

carl at algofutures 

Some folks have written me saying that The Cloud does not have application in the Trading Industry because of latency issues.

Some of you may already be familiar with my thoughts on The Latency Hype so I won't delve into them here.

For this blog post, let's put Trade Execution Services within The Cloud aside for the time being and focus solely on the R&D side of your trading business.

The Cloud harmonizes the intrinsic elasticity of the Demand for Processing Cycles with the inelasticity of the Supply of Processing Cycles

One of the great advantages of The Cloud is that you can ramp up processing power without having to provision and/or commit to servers.  Once you are done with your calculations you release your leased processing cycles back into the pool of The Cloud and forget about them.

All of the hardware, software, rack space, electricity, etc. that it took to run your calculations are now offered on a pay-as-you-go model via The Cloud.

Gone are the days of provisioning your data processing resources for your projected peak load.

With The Cloud's real-time scalable pay-as-you-go model you can spin up 1,000 servers and run them for an hour for the same cost as spinning up 1 server and running it for 1,000 hours.

How cool is that?

...and the cycle time is cheap.  Below are cycle costs from Amazon's Web Offering (EC2):

Note - we are Vendor Neutral and are only quoting Amazon's pricing as an example,  not an endorsement.

There are different types of Cloud offerings and depending upon the type of number crunching that you do, or would like to do, and the composure of your current Intellectual Property code base, Amazon may not be the best offering for you.

In our next post about Algo and Quant Trading in The Cloud, Tim Kraska will document a Logical Design for Cloud Services that will enable you to port your current IP to The Cloud.