STAC Report: STAC-T1 with ADHOC Teknoloji HFFT-02A (Versal Premium) Based Ultra Low Latency HFT Solution

First STAC-T1 with a FPGA-based Tick-to-Trade Appliance

17 October 2024

STAC recently performed STAC-T1 Benchmark tests on a system by ADHOC Teknoloji. The system is a FPGA-based Appliance using the AMD Versal™ Premium platform and all code was written in VHDL.

STAC-T1.EMINI uses network timestamping to measure the tick-to-trade latency of any trading solution capable of consuming recorded market data for CME E-mini futures and sending orders to simulated exchange gateways using the FIX 4.2 protocol, with minimal trading logic in between. STAC-T1.EMINI indicates how much of a trading firm's latency budget a given solution will require in order to process market data and send orders.

This project used a version of STAC-T1.EMINI (labeled version C) updated to use the latest CME market data protocol, with data from a recent quadruple witching day. In addition, this test was run with separate A and B feeds instead of a single, combined feed as in previous tests. This makes the results relevant to current markets but means the results cannot be fairly compared to previous STAC-T1.EMINI results.

A new metric, End-of-Trigger to Start-of-Frame (EOT-SOF) has been proposed by ADHOC and provided in this report. The metric shows the time the “algo” takes to trade once it has all the information required to act.

ADHOC wishes to highlight the following results:

• At 1x market rate, the latency from the start of the market data message to the start of the order frame (STAC-T1.EMINI.vC.1x.SOM-to-SOF) was:
• 115.07 nanoseconds (mean)
• 140.04 nanoseconds (99th percentile)
• 163.88 nanoseconds (MAX)
• 9.45 nanoseconds (standard deviation)
• At 8x market rate, the latency from the start of the market data message to the start of the order frame (STAC-T1.EMINI.vC.8x.SOM-to-SOF) was:
• 115.35 nanoseconds (mean)
• 141.08 nanoseconds (99th percentile)
• 401.88 nanoseconds (MAX)
• 11.66 nanoseconds (standard deviation)
• At 1x market rate, the latency from the end of the market data message sequence number to the start of the order frame (STAC-T1.EMINI.vX.1x.EOT-to-SOF) was:
• 76.40 nanoseconds (mean)
• 80.44 nanoseconds (99th percentile)
• 80.92 nanoseconds (MAX)
• 1.70 nanoseconds (standard deviation)
• At 8x market rate, the latency f from the end of the market data message sequence number to the start of the order frame (STAC-T1.EMINI.vX.8x.EOT-to-SOF) was:
• 76.70 nanoseconds (mean)
• 80.19 nanoseconds (99th percentile)
• 347.38 nanoseconds (MAX)
• 6.61 nanoseconds (standard deviation)

The report analyzes latencies and other metrics in detail. Premium subscribers also have access to a detailed STAC Configuration Disclosure.

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