Wednesday 24 March 2010

A few thoughts on the FIX Protocol conference in London - march 2010

Yesterday, I was at the FIX protocol conference: http://fixprotocol.org/fplevents/emea_2010/
There must have been about 500 people there.
I come back with mixed feelings about the conference. I certainly attended a few interesting sessions but I also got stuck in some so-and-so presentations. I might write a few other posts about the conference but first I will indulge in saying what I did not like.

The session: The design aspects of the fix protocol – by H. Klein and M. Simpson

1] the session slides were going through in a very unexciting way about a few designated message types such as ExecutionReport, MassQuote, etc.  Even worse, a whole slide was dedicated to the fact that some fix tags had been deprecated since 4.3 and therefore we should not use them.

C’mon guys, it’s march 2010 do we really need this ?

2] M. Simpson talked about some benefits of FIX.5.0.  one of these being App. Versioning.
If I understood this correctly it’s a feature that would allow you to get some messages in one version (say FIX.4.2) and some other messages in another version (say FIX.4.4)  Surely that’s okay for me. It means that tools like our FIX Log Analyzer will become even more useful.  But seriously guys can anybody think of a good justification for such a feature. How ugly (and I am using a euphemism here) would it have to be the code that will handle this part.

Thanks for reading this and if you were at the conference too please share your thoughts with us.

Marcello.

3 comments:

  1. Hi Marcello, I was there too.
    They said there were 850 people at the first speech, although it did seem a bit too much.
    As for me, I found the presentation about FIXatdl very useful.
    People are beginning to talk about it.
    see:
    http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21219

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  2. The thing about FIX is that it is boring.
    So the FIX Protocol conference had to be inevitably boring.
    And the usual thing: many vendors just keen to show their 'revolutionary' (their claims not mine) software.

    Anyway to add on your description of sessions.
    I attended the
    "What is the Business Scope of the FIX Protocol?" where
    Alasdair Haynes, CEO of Chi-X Europe, effectively just told me how great they are CHI-X. A story of a success using FIX.4.2 and building a business in less than 6 months.
    if everything is said is true the guy had a fascinating story...

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  3. Well, nice topic you have here.. thanks for sharing it with us.. I always happy to visit your blogs as you share useful information. Thanks.

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