Creating Real Time Simulations With Your Data Feed

As you know, FTS runs a variety of real time cases based around our teaching guide.  You may not know that if you have a data feed, you can run your own trading simulations using our real time system.  I realized that we had not written much about this capability just the other day, when we were helping a school with Reuter’s data feeds implement their own simulation.

There are quite a few trading rooms that subscribe to real time data from a variety of exchanges.  Even if the data vendor provides a mock trading platform, they are not set up for instructors.  For example, it can be hard to monitor student portfolios and calculate relative performance for a class, and these tools typically don’t provide a structured series of exercise to guide student learning.

The FTS RT Server solves this problem.  All the cases we run use this server.  You have to create the simulation, and this is done in an Excel workbook.  You specify the trading names and passwords, what can be traded, who can trade what, and so on.  We have also greatly simplified the connection to the data feed: all you have to do is bring the real time data into the Excel workbook.  This serves as a generic interface, and can handle quite a large amount of data; every data feed we have encountered in a trading room has a utility that downloads quotes into Excel. 

Students use the FTS Real Time Client to connect to the server, and then it works just as with the simulations we run.  Instructors have the support required, described, for example, here. 

If you are interested in this solution, please contact us; we will be happy to show you and your trading room staff how to create real time simulations with your own real time data feed.