Kyte Goes Live with Geneos Feed Latency Monitor to Manage Global Data

Futures commission merchant Kyte Group has become the first ITRS Geneos user to move into production with the company’s Feed Latency Monitor, an addition to the Geneos real-time monitoring and performance management solution that can measure latency across a number of exchange feeds and alert users to delays or gaps in the feeds.

Kyte has been an ITRS Geneos user for about 18 months and worked with the company and a handful of other users to develop the Geneos Feed Latency Monitor (FLM). Another two ITRS clients and members of the beta test programme have deployed the solution and are also preparing to go live.

Kyte has been running Geneos FLM for over a month and can, for the first time, identify delays or gaps in multiple exchange feeds coming into its trading systems. The company’s set up is complex and well matched to Geneos FLM. As an independent futures commission merchant, the firm provides clearing services, risk management, financing and direct market access to proprietary traders, brokers, algo trading systems, market makers and hedge funds that transact on leading exchanges. It gives traders access to a wide range of instruments and asset classes, runs proprietary trading and brokerage services, and offers access to 15 derivatives venues, as well as multilateral trading facilities, bonds and spot FX venues through seven commercial trading platforms.

Recognising such diversity, the Geneos FLM interface can be configured to look at latency across a number of feeds. It makes no distinction between the characteristics of consolidated feeds, direct exchange feeds or in-house data sources, and hence is aimed at allowing users to understand the integrity of input to trading platforms.

To measure feed latency on trading platforms on a global basis, Geneos FLM calculates the relative latency between a consolidated reference feed and incoming direct exchange feeds. The solution alerts users to market data integrity issues, while the ability to analyse market data flow and identify bottlenecks and latency means traders’ price latency concerns can be addressed quickly.

Describing Kyte’s use of the software, director of IT Allan Chapman says: “The real-time market data we distribute to the trading community has to be of the highest quality to allow accurate trading decisions to be made. If quality is lost, opportunities are missed and revenue potential is lowered. The design of Geneos FLM was the key factor in our decision to use it. Geneos connects through an ISV API in the same way as trading applications, so it has the same perspective as the trader, which is ideal.”

He adds: “Geneos is an extremely cost effective solution as it can be deployed remotely, allowing Kyte to easily extend feed latency monitoring to anywhere in the world and identify latency in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

Kevin Covington, deputy CEO and European managing director of ITRS, says: “Kyte’s intention was always to develop this kind of holistic environment, which is why it came to ITRS in the first place and worked with us on Geneos FLM. Kyte is a relatively small organisation, but the diversity of how and where it trades is extremely complex, making it a good example of how Geneos FLM can make such a scenario work. The company can now understand the external environment and any impacts in it. Before, this was difficult to see and it was difficult to correlate information and visualise it. We have made things that are difficult to spot easier to spot and given customers a dashboard that allows them to visualise and understand complex environments.”

Noting that Geneos FLM is not geared to any particular type of trading, but that it is perhaps most applicable to high frequency, low latency trading, Covington concludes: “Kyte has done a great job with Geneos FLM. While ITRS can provide the tool, Kyte has added value to the overall picture.”