A Chicago options-trader finds Ephlux their best option!

The client had envisioned an application that would serve as a commodity option-trading platform for all. It would enable users to view real time market data which would aid in their purchase decisions. Ephlux help make the vision become a reality!

Story

The company wanted Ephlux to provide an actionable roadmap for the research, architecture, design and development of a commodity exchange options-trading platform. The engagement aimed at a long-term initiative to come up with a product suite of various trading applications to be offered to the individual traders, hedgers and corporate traders on subscription-based and stand-alone models.
Ephlux performed a detailed research of the US commodity options trade, Chicago Board Of Trade, various technology APIs and products available in the market and chalked out an agile implementation strategy which was brought to life in subsequent months.

Challenges

The customer wanted to get a commodity future options trading platform integrated with Chicago Board of Trade and other exchanges through a 3rd party data feed provider.
The platform was to provide the client and its customers with tools to show real-time market feeds in order to help them make timely sale/purchase decisions. The need in the early phase was to show and report the market feeds in various customizable formats and charts. Another key challenge was to provide the individual traders, hedgers and corporate traders the possibility of conducting simplified as well as highly complex analytics; all within the same set of tools with integrated software modules.
In the later phases, the software needed a web-based centralized registration module as well as online trading facilities to allow the client and its customers to future-trade using the software primarily on Chicago Board of Trade by using various vendor’s trading APIs.

Solution

After performing a quick research in to the business domain, Ephlux came up with a proof-of-concept application based on a secure skeleton architecture in the initial month of the engagement.
The proof-of-concept application helped the customer and Ephlux to further drill down on the requirements by serving as a functional communication tool. Many incremental refinements were made to the original application based on an ongoing collaboration between the Software Engineers, Business Analyst and the customer representatives.
This agile methodology greatly helped fast-pacing the whole development process by unleashing the requirements quickly and feeding them into a functional software which everybody on both sides could touch, feel and own. Once the application was reasonably matured functionally, all non-functional aspects including scalability, performance and high-availability were worked upon. A solid network and hardware architecture is being planned to provide top-notch security, built-in disaster recovery using robust fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure extreme availability. The project is planned to enter the next phase of the development which shall allow the service to be made available to all the options-trader of CBOT through a subscription based ASP model.