DEV Community: Devexperts

How to Start a Stock Brokerage Firm

Devexperts — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:50:21 +0000

Launching a stock brokerage firm from scratch might seem like a daunting challenge. But with proper guidance, it can be a straightforward process. This guide breaks down all the steps involved in launching a retail stock brokerage, so it becomes easy to do in a few months.

All interested parties can use this guide to learn what it takes to open a stock or options brokerage. Our primary focus will be the trading platform—the core of this business.

When opening a retail stock brokerage, the first step is to choose your broker type:

broker
dealer
broker-dealer

Becoming a broker

A broker acts as an intermediary between an investor and a securities exchange in an agency capacity. Brokers do not trade on their own account or hold securities in their inventory. They earn their income primarily through commissions or fees charged for their services, based on the size or value of the transactions they facilitate.

Becoming a dealer

A dealer acts as a principal, trading for their own account, meaning they trade for their own profit or loss. Dealers make money through the bid-ask spread, which is the difference between the price at which they buy a security (the bid) and the price at which they sell it (the ask). They play a crucial role in providing liquidity to the market by buying or selling securities when supply and demand are imbalanced.

Becoming a broker-dealer

A broker-dealer combines the two functions mentioned above. They can act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers (like a broker). They trade on their own account by holding securities in their inventory (like a dealer). Broker-dealers are subject to a broader range of regulations than brokers or dealers alone, as they must comply with rules governing both agency and principal transactions. In the United States, broker-dealers must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and be members of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Once your decision becomes final, you can then make up your mind about which business to support, whether it be retail or institutional. This decision will determine what license and technology are needed to be obtained later on.

Obtaining a license

The next step is to apply for and obtain the relevant license. This guide will focus specifically on broker-dealers.

In the United States, you can obtain a broker-dealer license from FINRA. The application process can take up to six months. All necessary documentation must be collected and submitted as soon as possible to minimize the amount of time lost in this process.

Follow the 5 steps below to obtain a broker-dealer license successfully:

Reserve a company name
Sign up for system access
Pay the application fees
Meet FINRA’s standards of admission
Submit form BD (a uniform application for Broker-Dealer Registration) online, hard-copy form BD, and all additional required forms and fingerprints

The application will be reviewed and processed within 180 calendar days. The next step is to decide what technology and software to use.

Obtaining operational technology

Once the application for a license has been submitted, it is time to focus on obtaining the necessary tools to run your brokerage. The biggest decision to make here is whether you will build or buy a trading platform.

Building a platform

The first option is to build everything from the ground up. However, this option has both advantages and disadvantages.

One big advantage is that building a platform will guarantee you a solution that meets your brokerage’s exact workflow and user interface needs.

The biggest disadvantage, however, is the sheer number of resources required to build a trading platform from scratch, both in terms of time and money.

Add the ongoing costs of maintenance and upgrades, and you can see why so many financial services businesses opt to outsource their software needs to experienced third parties.

Beyond the economic reasons, specialization in financial software development has reached a point where it’s hard for in-house dev teams to compete with specialist vendors.

Today’s trading venues choose third parties in order to remain competitive in a market that’s evolving at a rapid rate.

Buying a platform

The second option is to buy an existing platform provided by software vendors. Buying or licensing a platform can be a much cheaper and easier option to implement, and it will also allow you to deliver a unique offering to your clients.

One advantage of buying a platform is that it enables brokers to benefit from market-tested software. This, in turn, cuts down your solution’s development cycle and time-to-market.

Today’s vendors often offer 24/7 support, meaning that if you run into technical issues, there’s always someone on-call to help resolve your issue.

It may seem like licensing an off-the-shelf platform would limit the platform’s look and feel; however, this is not the case. For example, a solution like DXtrade offers a white-label trading platform with an extensive configuration engine to support even the most bespoke workflows.

DXtrade has been developed to allow brokers to tailor their platform according to their unique needs, to match the user’s color palette and preference for the overall look.

Devexperts offers tiered licensing options for firms of all sizes. At all tiers, brokers are able to make DXtrade their own, customizing the look and feel of the platform so that it can be tailored to their clients.

We call this deep white-labeling, and it’s one of the reasons that DXtrade has proven to be so versatile. Brokers, exchanges, banks, wealth managers, and others each get a slightly different version of the platform that’s been tailored to their respective businesses.

New stock brokers can even have their solution ready to deploy within a month.

6 things to consider when choosing a trading platform

When choosing a platform and discussing it with the vendor’s solution architects, you need to consider several things.

Supported asset classes

Based on the broker-dealer license and prospective asset class offering, a platform needs to be flexible enough to support your current business needs and future growth potential. A few asset classes to consider for retail trading are:

Equities
Indices
Options
Futures
ETFs
Fixed income (bonds)
Crypto

Of course, not all of them are necessary. You may, for instance, begin by offering just stocks, and once ready to move forward, enabling a new asset class can be as simple as making a few clicks.

Cash vs. margin trading

Another factor to consider is the type of trading you want to offer your clients. This will dictate which trading accounts the platforms will support.

For cash account trading, the money deposited to purchase securities is the only money investors can use. Simply put, investors can only trade with the cash available in their accounts.

Cash accounts

Using cash accounts is a straightforward, less risky way for brokers to do business. Investors can’t go short and can only trade simple options under predefined scenarios if offered by the broker.

Margin accounts

If the broker is willing to take on more risk, they can use margin accounts to lend money to customers.

The customer will use borrowed money to invest, magnifying their profits and losses through leverage. Margin account users pay interest on any money borrowed. They can open short positions and use additional option strategies.

However, margin trading often requires brokers to comply with local market regulations set by the applicable government. For example, brokers in the US need to monitor the number of trades executed per day and limit the margin rate for retail traders.

A platform like DXtrade supports cash and margin accounts out-of-the-box. For cash accounts, DXtrade offers full securities trading in all supported quantities with settled funds. For margin accounts, it includes Reg-T margining for equities and equity options, custom margin profiles, and margin override on the instrument level.

Order management system

An Order Management System, or OMS for short, is an electronic system developed to execute securities orders.

An OMS allows brokers/dealers to track each order’s progress. As such, choosing the right system is vital.

When choosing an OMS, it’s important to take into account the supported asset classes. Other things to consider include the quantity increments supported, the number of counterparties or destinations, and the types of end users or traders being targeted. For example, the OMS module in DXtrade supports orders both in fractional quantities and notional amounts.

An important component of an OMS is the routing capabilities based on supported asset classes and executing destinations. For example, the DXtrade platform has a routing wheel that allows brokers to establish routing profiles on the asset class level. It features automatic reroute if orders are rejected and allows brokers to update route percentages and destinations in real-time.

For brokers that support fractional trading, an OMS can route orders as received to destinations in fractional and notional quantities. It could also provide a facility for brokers to manage fractional inventory accounts in a principal capacity. This can be achieved with a fractional rounding algorithm that takes orders in fractional and notional quantities, rounds to whole share quantities based on platform configuration, and routes to the street in round lots.

Upon order execution, the algorithm allocates the original order quantity to the client’s account and allocates the remainder to a broker inventory account. The DXtrade OMS offers a configurable fractional algorithm, and it also provides an inventory management system to minimize the principal account position risk.

Risk management and monitoring

Risk management is a crucial component of any trading platform and most provide monitoring tools built into the solution itself. Based on the supported asset classes, it is important to identify what risk settings and monitoring capabilities your brokerage needs. DXtrade can provide a customizable set of risk profiles for pre-trade offers.

A risk profile tool can also help determine traders’ reliability. It enables risk assessment for a portfolio of options. As a result, users can estimate potential P/L while simulating changes in key parameters. Said parameters might include volatility, time, and underlying price.

Additionally, real-time monitoring for account balances across clients is crucial. This will allow the broker/dealer to liquidate single or multiple accounts in bulk by closing all positions, trade on an account’s behalf, or export data from the grid.

Orders need to be monitored as well. In certain situations, the firm’s employees may need to replace or cancel simple orders. For instance, this may happen if a trading terminal experiences an unexpected load and crashes when the market is highly volatile. In this case, the client may need to make changes to their account by phone, such as exporting data or canceling orders in bulk.

Monitoring all clients’ open positions is also crucial. One needs to be able to order audit trails for all accounts, manually import positions, and export data.

The trading platform’s OMS section is responsible for performing risk management. But it also handles the following monitoring activities:

Real-time exposure monitoring
Risk management groups and profiles
Price stream management
Execution settings

Reporting

In smaller companies, clearing agents and back office systems are responsible for compliance reports. Larger companies, however, will handle this task themselves.

DXtrade can send account statements as a monthly report. Brokerage account statements generally include a summary of the broker or dealer’s holdings (which is the recent market value of one’s holdings), account numbers, and contact information for financial professionals and clearing firms.

Connectivity

One of the most important features of a platform is its connectivity options for external systems and venues.

Here are a few third-party integrations that should be taken into consideration:

Client portal
Executing destinations
Clearing agents and back office
Market data
Financial news

Most OMSs leverage FIX protocol and APIs to support connectivity, from inbound order flow and client onboarding to outbound order routing, compliance reporting, and clearing.

Value-added features

Today, more options are available to brokers than ever before. As vendors compete to offer the best all-round products and services, a variety of value-added features are emerging.

Compatibility and ease of integration is the key. Whether it be the third-party integrations a provider has under its belt, or how it leverages AI to intelligently connect between various brokerage functions, learning what extra features a provider offers is important in the decision-making process.

AI assistants

For Devexperts clients, our AI-powered communication channel, Devexa, has been a game-changer. Devexa serves both end traders and brokerage teams. For brokers, Devexa can ease support congestion by serving as a front line for routine queries.

She can also be used to target communications to specific client groups, and a recent iteration has even added the ability to distribute and handle the payments for “premium” content.

Devexa can be deployed wherever the business needs her most, such as on landing pages, aiding registration and verification, on a range of social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, and also as a key part of the DXtrade platform itself.

Traders enjoy access to a highly capable trading assistant that can provide detailed wealth-management-style reports with metrics such as portfolio valuation histories, breakdown by asset class, and profit/loss summaries.

She can help with market research, provide price alerts, and place trades on behalf of the trader, all in natural language.

A recent Devexa update brought community features online, allowing brokers to offer a secure communication channel where their clients can message each other in a chat/forum-like environment.

Products like Devexa add value, which can only increase as these systems become more sophisticated.

Pre-configured integrations

The attractiveness of a vendor’s stock brokerage solution increases depending on how much work has been done on third-party integrations. This is because the system is immediately compatible with a wide variety of other products and services that the broker may require.

Particularly for new firms that have yet to settle on a complete list of vendors, pre-built CRM, liquidity, clearing, and payment integrations significantly cut lead times down and ensure a smooth launch.

Operational resilience

As the trading day grows longer and settlement times contract, brokerage infrastructures are being tested to their limits. Those entering the market today must ensure the solutions they source can meet the challenges of a rapidly changing environment.

This includes the ability to quickly launch new instruments and to make changes to existing markets in simple logic, without requiring systems to be taken offline.

The need for round-the-clock trading is also increasing uptime requirements. This means that brokerage systems have to be capable of running uninterrupted. Whether it be under peak loads, during a system update, or even when a critical system component is experiencing technical difficulties, firms able to maintain consistent uptime will gain a competitive advantage.

This requires implementing resilience strategies such as duplicating critical components so that failsafes can take over should a system experience technical difficulties. Depending on the scope of the project, this can be done both in cloud environments and in “bare metal.”

Additionally, brokerage infrastructures should be engineered with sufficient “headroom,” allowing a smooth service for end traders even during periods of peak activity. Firms that successfully prepare for the above concerns ahead of time will be able to keep their clients trading, even during the most exuberant bull markets.

The wrap-up

Building a brokerage is not a quick and easy task. You could, however, license a platform that is already available. This saves time and allows you to focus on marketing and launching your stock brokerage business. However, for a truly unique result—if time and money allow it—it may be best to request a custom solution from companies that specialize in this domain.

Whatever you choose, we at Devexperts are at your service. We can create a tailored solution for you, or you can license one of our out-of-the-box platforms. Request a consultation, and we’ll be happy to guide you on your journey.

How to Build a Futures Trading System

Devexperts — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:24:36 +0000

At Devexperts we’re always keen to share the insights we’ve gathered over the years as a fintech provider. Lately, there’s been increased interest in the development of futures trading platforms, as well as other futures trading software components required to start a derivatives trading business.

In the following article, we’ll present some of the things you should keep in mind if you’re interested in the above. More than a “how to build a trading platform” article, we intend to focus on the various pieces of technology required by different futures trading businesses, from full-blown futures exchanges, to retail brokers offering market access to individual investors.

In-house or outsource?

This is the burning “to be or not to be” question that always seems to be front and center for financial services firms. As a fintech development house, we obviously have a stance on this issue that’s difficult to separate from our business model and company mission.

However, as you’ll see below, Devexperts isn’t in the business of finessing our clients into choosing us over others, or indeed over their own capabilities. We create off-the-shelf components that can be integrated individually or arranged together as turnkey solutions.

We’re also well-versed in building things from scratch as custom developments, and in working with existing in-house systems, as well as integrating our technologies with those of other third parties. In other words, we meet our clients where they are, proposing and implementing solutions based on their current and future needs.

We do believe that the cost associated with a lot of in-house development, which includes monetary, time, and human capital considerations, as well as the on-going operational expenses required to maintain and update in-house developed systems, can cause the scales to tip in favor of outsourced development.

This is particularly so in the case of financial software, which is so central to a business’s competitiveness and bottom line. Having said that, a lot of our clients do great in-house work, and only require our expertise for specific areas of their overall business needs. Okay, with that out of the way, let’s continue.

Hardware or software setup?

The type of hardware required for your futures trading business depends on what kind of entity you’re planning to operate. Exchanges and market makers, for instance, or algorithmic and high-frequency trading (HFT) operations, have far less tolerance for latency and so require much more extensive hardware setups.

In order to get latency down to those critical sub-100 microsecond order processing times, “bare metal” installations are required. These involve physical servers equipped with networking cards that support hardware acceleration, allowing the operating system to be bypassed in order for data to be sent directly into the network.

For firms whose business depends on trading directly with existing exchanges, these physical servers must be collocated at the exchange data centers in question. Every microsecond counts for these entities, so much so that at these minute slices of time even cable lengths become a consideration.

Depending on where in the liquidity pyramid your firm is located, you may not require any of the above. The traders of other types of futures businesses, such as retail futures brokers, do not have the same strict latency requirements and so these can be set up using virtual machines, Software-as-a-Service solutions (SaaS), and can serve clients by integrating with execution destinations such as CQG or StoneX.

User interface requirements

Your futures trading business will require a number of different interfaces. These are required for clients to be able to interact with your trading systems, but also for your own staff to manage operations.

The two most fundamental of which are the futures trading platform and the administrative user interface. Your futures trading platform is a client-facing user interface allowing clients to chart available instruments, input orders, and manage their accounts.

The administrative UI provides your venue’s admins with a bird’s-eye view of what’s taking place on the various markets you offer, including orders, trades, and exposure, as well as the ability to zoom in on groups, clients, and symbols in order to make necessary risk management adjustments.

Beyond these, your business will also require other UIs for technical staff to monitor the current health of system hardware and software, as well as UIs specifically designed for back-office staff to interact with external clearing and settlement services, and for compliance and reporting use cases.

The best all-round solution for futures brokers sourcing their liquidity from execution venues, is a trading platform that comprises the client-facing frontend for order input and account management, the backend for risk management administration staff, a capable order management system (OMS) that sits between the two, as well as the flexibility to integrate other important third-party externals such as customer relationship management (CRM) and compliance software via an open and thoroughly documented API.

Connectivity

Order entry gateways such as REST API or FIX protocol are required for clients to be able to send order instructions and receive order execution confirmations.

A database for storing full event histories for clients, business operations, and reporting purposes can be connected to via REST API. This is required in order to be able to pull up all order entry details, confirmations, and trade histories.

Websocket feeds are used to distribute market data to clients. These feeds allow clients to subscribe to one-way data streams that include instrument price action and order book updates. Websocket connections are also used so that the venue is able to subscribe to market data and receive order execution reports from its own liquidity providers.

Matching engine

The heart of any financial exchange is its matching engine. Our own matching engine is a clustered, replicated state machine that utilizes the RAFT protocol to achieve distributed consensus. This matching engine is an example of a Devexperts component that can be sourced in isolation, or be part of a larger from scratch development.

Matching engines are required to support a variety of different order types such as Limit, Stop, Stop Limit, and Market. They also require an execution algorithm to define how incoming orders are processed. First in, first out (FIFO) is an example of such an algorithm that executes orders according to price-time priority.

A variety of different order execution rules must also be supported, such as DAY (valid of the day), GTC (good till cancelled), FOK (fill or kill), and IOC (immediate or cancel), as well as the ability to manually modify and cancel orders, as well as the handling of trade busts and corrections.

Your matching engine also has to be able to recognize a variety of different market states, such as: Pre-open, Open, Paused, Halted, and Closed.

To maintain control over system-wide risk, risk management features such as exposure limits, soft and hard price limits, configurable self-match prevention, and price banding should be available, as well as a universal kill-switch.

In order to be able to scale horizontally, and to be able to easily add new instruments without experiencing downtime, the system should support the running of multiple matching engine instances.

Futures specific considerations

Owing to certain complexities specific to the trading of futures and options, your trading platform architecture must be equipped to implement different margin calculation methodologies depending on the business in question, its jurisdiction, and business-specific risk management practices.

Two popular margin calculation methodologies for futures trading are SPAN (Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk) and Reg T (Regulation T). SPAN is a methodology that calculates margin requirements according to assessments of global one-day portfolio risk, rather than that of individual positions. Reg T determines the percentage of the purchase price of a security a trader may borrow from a trading venue (the Federal Reserve Board has set the maximum at 50%).

Margin methodologies like SPAN and Reg T are important for risk management as they ensure that traders have sufficient capital to cover losses in a variety of market scenarios. Methodologies such as SPAN require complicated real-time calculations that take multiple factors into account such as volatility, decreases in time to expiration, strike prices and risk-free interest rates.

The order management system (OMS) in question must be equipped with algorithms that can handle the combinatorial explosion that results when these multiple factors are computed for large numbers of orders, as well as the ability to differentiate between SPAN-eligible and SPAN-ineligible securities, and to apply different methodologies to the latter.

Futures order management systems are required to perform these complex pre-trade validations, as well as to constantly monitor post-trade health so that positions may be automatically liquidated when certain criteria are met. These are much more complex when using methodologies that factor in overall portfolio risk rather than individual position risk.

Trading platform essentials

In recent years, the bar has been raised significantly as far as trading platforms are concerned. Today, traders expect your platform to be a single point of contact with your business, where they can register, get verified, deposit/withdraw, trade, and manage their accounts all from the same interface.

Beyond this, flexibility of access is also a must, with web-based and mobile instances of your platform expected to perform just as well and provide the same great user experience as your desktop version.

It should also be customizable to a high degree, enabling your customers to rearrange all the various on-screen components in a manner that suits them and that are most intuitive to navigate given their trading style. If sourcing a third-party platform, it will also have to be sufficiently customizable on your end so as to allow your offering to stand out from that of your competitors.

For futures and options-specific implementations, it will have to be connected to price feeds from exchanges such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), integrate with Futures Commission Merchants (FCMs) and provide features such as Depth of Market (DOM) ladder trading and support for different margin calculation methodologies (such as the CME’s SPAN discussed above).

Order processing and risk management must be performed according to the criteria set by the relevant regulatory authorities that apply to your jurisdiction, and must include the flexibility for your business to be able to apply its own custom rules for risk management.

Third-party integrations

Whether developing your futures trading system in-house, or outsourcing it, there will inevitably be some degree of third-party software integration necessary. CRM, compliance, customer service, market news, technical analysis, and market data are all examples of software that may be necessary to outsource.

For all these systems to work together in a seamless manner, they have to be integrated together correctly, which requires quite specific technical know-how. When selecting vendors, in our experience, it’s important to select companies that share and document their APIs. This makes integration a much smoother process that can even be performed in-house, and reduces the likelihood of vendor lock-in. At Devexperts, we make our APIs public for this reason.

Disaster recovery

Recovery strategies vary from venue to venue and are dependent on the cost of disruption for the business in question. Exchanges and large institutional participants have almost zero tolerance for system disruption. These financial entities require elaborate disaster recovery solutions that include duplicate bare metal systems hosted in geographically diverse data centers that allow complete system replay to be initiated shortly after an unforeseen break in service.

Smaller retail enterprises that, likewise, consider the cost of downtime unacceptable have been known to create system redundancies by running a duplicate trading infrastructure from a different vendor designed to be able to keep trading services running when their main systems are down for maintenance, or due to some other unexpected disruption.

These systems are temporary in nature and are only intended to keep trading activity available until the main system is back up and running. We have designed and implemented such failsafe systems for our clients.

Alternatively, another approach to disaster recovery is to have a duplicate system running in parallel as per the first example, but instead of duplicate physical servers, the redundancy is created in a cloud environment in geographically distributed data centers. This latter strategy is more affordable and allows smaller entities to implement resilience strategies that were once out of their budgets.

Our approach to trading systems

Over the years, we’ve been privileged to work on most of the technologies that brokers and exchange venues rely on, such as trading platforms, order management systems, matching engines, connectivity solutions, and more.

This process has informed our approach, which focuses on creating standalone components that can be sourced by clients individually or combined in different configurations in order to create complete trading solutions for financial businesses.

Our extensive experience as a custom development house also comes into play for clients that have additional requirements. In situations where they require a little more than a combination of our existing components, we’re always willing to go that extra mile and create custom solutions, or to integrate products from other vendors, in order to bridge the gap.

Devexperts trading solutions

Broadly speaking, the components that Devexperts is best known for are as follows:

Charting libraries & trading platforms: Whether seeking a charting interface or full trading platform, Devexperts makes a number of versions of its professional UIs available to a variety of financial services businesses. Our DXcharts product covers clients that don’t require the trading component, while different versions of our flagship DXtrade platform have been created to specialize in: OTC derivatives such as CFDs, spot equities, listed derivatives such as stocks, options, futures, bonds, and mutual funds, as well as both spot and margin crypto products.

Matching engines: Our turnkey DXmatch solution has been developed to be the centerpiece of a variety of trading environments including stock and derivative exchanges, electronic communication networks (ECNs), dark pools and other alternative trading systems (ATS), crypto exchanges, and NFT marketplaces.

Order management systems (OMS): Our broker-neutral DXOMS order management system features an open architecture allowing for ease of integration with a variety of external applications including platform frontends and risk management systems.

Risk management solutions: Our multi-asset risk management and pre-trade control solution comes bundled with the DXtrade platform and offers brokers exhaustive real-time monitoring and control of exposure, as well as surgical hedging features such as the ability to run differing A/B book profiles, internally manage equity orders fractionally, and apply different margin settings, all on a per group, per client, or per instrument basis.

Market data solutions: Via our subsidiary dxFeed, we offer institutional grade, tick-level, low latency financial data to a host of different market participants via an accessible API. dxFeed also offers a variety of advanced solutions for firms seeking to create their own custom indices

Learn more?

Despite the extensive explanations provided above, it’s difficult to cover all possible permutations of what a futures trading system might look like according to the specific segment of the market it seeks to serve.

We hope we’ve been able to clue you in to some of the things to consider and to look out for, as well as offering our own perspective on how such systems should be put together and/or sourced.

To learn more about our development process, or to discuss any of the topics raised above, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team.

The post How to Build a Futures Trading Systemappeared first on Devexperts Blog

DXtrade: The Options Platform for Your Brokerage

Devexperts — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:43:43 +0000

How to build an options trading platform , in-house, custom, or off-the-shelf? This is a perennial question for brokers, exchanges, and other financial services businesses. Is it better to develop these technologies in-house or to outsource this key component to third-party experts?

As a technology provider in the fintech space since 2002, we at Devexperts have gained a great deal of experience working in a variety of different roles. We’ve established ourselves as a custom development house that’s well-versed in building proprietary fintech systems from scratch.

We’re also very comfortable working alongside in-house and legacy systems, adapting and extending the capabilities of existing platforms, as well as offering a line of off-the-shelf brokerage components to fit the needs and budgets of a variety of financial players.

We’ve found that client-facing financial services businesses seldom possess the in-house technical expertise to undertake such demanding development projects without any outside assistance. It’s a simple issue of specialization, the demands of modern traders are such that in-house development is beyond the scope of many brokers, exchanges, and other financial firms. So, when this conclusion is reached, what are the options?

In our experience, futures and options brokers wishing to establish themselves in the market, or to revamp their existing platforms for a new generation of traders, are then torn between whether to outsource the development of a custom proprietary platform or to source a white-label solution .

Choosing between these two options can often seem like a double bind because custom development is expensive and time-consuming, while white label solutions are sometimes regarded as too cookie-cutter for many trading firms.

Over the years, we’ve seen this issue repeatedly arise when dealing with prospective clients. We observed a gap in the market that we believed our experience in custom development could address.

Custom dev features at an off-the-shelf price

At Devexperts, we offer three different levels of customization on our flagship DXtrade options trading platform.

For start-ups and financial firms on a budget, we offer an off-the-shelf version that benefits from sponsored features. These features go beyond typical white-label branding customizations and offer smaller options businesses the ability to stand out without breaking the bank.

For more established options trading businesses, we offer an enterprise version of DXtrade in which they can have any functionality and extra features built on top of DXtrade by our experienced team of over 800 software engineers. This can include any unique features that are important to the business in question.

For options brokerages that want to take possession of their own trading technologies, DXtrade’s source code is available for purchase. This is as close to owning a proprietary, custom-built platform as it comes, minus the lengthy lead times and development costs. This allows brokers to take ownership of the platform and build anything they require on top of it themselves.

Web application or desktop?

A common misconception that many people still labor under is that desktop trading platforms are superior in functionality to web-based trading platforms. This is a throwback to the earlier days of online trading when web applications were still rudimentary and limited in their abilities.

This notion still holds because many trading platform providers (especially those whose flagship platform was developed before the widespread switch to web applications) still maintain different versions of their trading platform, with web versions often lacking in functionality when compared to the “full” desktop version.

Our options trading platform bucks this trend by being available solely as a web-based application with no desktop equivalent. One of the main reasons for this decision is that we found that there wasn’t a great deal of interest among our clients for desktop versions.

This is especially so in the case of newer brokers and exchanges who seek to appeal to younger demographics. Desktop is on its way out, so we chose to focus on making a web-based options trading platform that could compete with any desktop version out there.

Modern browsers are more than capable of handling the performance requirements of today’s trading platforms. Rather than struggling to maintain consistency between different versions as in the case of other platform providers, we decided to put all of our efforts into a technology that’s more likely to stand the test of time, and that offers a consistent experience for all users.

Also, this consistency translates across operating system environments, which is another issue that many desktop platforms face. DXtrade is available as a single canonical version that looks, feels, and performs better than most other desktop trading platforms out there.

Options analytics

Options chains and preset options strategies

DXtrade offers traders detailed options chain information on all available options contracts relating to an underlying market. This includes price information on different strikes, bid and ask levels, spreads, and the number of outstanding options contracts (open interest).

The platform also provides information on the options Greeks, including delta (option price change for every unit change of the underlying), and vega (option price change for every unit of change in implied volatility of the underlying), as well as the midpoint between the respective bid and ask prices of each option (theoretical price).

Option chains are important to option traders as they allow them to research available options contracts, plan future trades, and analyze their potential profits against the risks involved.

In order to manage the risk/reward profile of potential positions, options traders use combinations of options to swing the odds in their favor and avoid the risk of a naked option incurring outsized losses.

DXtrade comes bundled with a variety of such options strategies as presets that can be selected from a list at order entry, these include vertical, straddle, strangle, ratio/back, combination, synthetic, covered, calendar, diagonal, butterfly, condor, and iron condor.

Useful visualization tools

DXtrade includes a variety of highly useful visualizations that can be customized as per users’ preferred charting layouts to include a variety of market information at a glance. One of the most useful is the DOM (depth of market) ladder that provides level 2 pricing information on the underlying assets pertaining to available options and futures contracts.

The DOM ladder provides options traders with a view of passive buy and sell orders in the respective order books of the underlying securities being traded. This allows them to observe imbalances between limit buy and sell orders, spot levels that could potentially serve as support or resistance, as well as prices at which large orders are able to be filled without significantly affecting the price of the underlying.

DXtrade also comes with customizable heat maps, allowing traders to quickly spot trending underlying assets. These heatmaps can be grouped according to the specific index the underlying securities belong to, such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite.

Alternatively, for those interested in specific sectors, DXtrade’s heatmaps can also be set to scan specific sectors, including basic materials, communication services, consumer cyclical, consumer defensive, energy, financial services, healthcare, industrials, real estate, technology, and utilities.

Stock & options screener

DXtrade’s stock and options screener allows traders to track real-time market behavior, receiving alerts when an instrument or underlying security meets their preset criteria. A comprehensive list of assets is covered by the screener, offering traders the ability to set a variety of search options by which to screen available assets.

Assets are searchable according to fundamental performance such as price-to-earnings ratio, market capitalization, earnings per share, and more. They are also searchable by technical criteria such as where the stock’s price action finds itself in relation to moving averages, relative strength index, moving average convergence divergence, and many other technical indicators.

Securities can also be screened by region, instrument type, and built-in presets, with real-time alerts provided whenever an asset’s performance fulfills the criteria of the search.

SPAN margin calculations

Options trading requires more complex risk management on the part of traders and the brokers that serve them. In this way, both parties can have access to a comprehensive view of not just any given open position, but the entire portfolio in question.

DXtrade allows options brokers to calculate margin based on portfolio risk by using SPAN (Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk) methodology. SPAN lets brokers calculate global one-day risk for each and every trader’s portfolio rather than merely the risk associated with just individual positions.

Taking price action, volatility, strike prices, time to expiration, and risk-free interest rates into account, the methodology estimates the worst-case single-day move for each portfolio in order to calculate the margin required to protect against this scenario. This also allows excess margin to be freed up for other positions.

Open APIs

Whatever options trading platform an interested broker chooses to source, there will inevitably be some software integration that has to take place. Whether this is with legacy systems or with other third-party software, such as CRM, back office, customer service, compliance, or value-added services such as news and analysis.

These disparate systems will have to be integrated with each other in order for brokerage operations as a whole to run smoothly and efficiently. In order to make these integrations as quick and painless as possible, Devexperts maintains open APIs for our DXtrade platform with full documentation so that it can easily be integrated with a far wider variety of other systems.

Choosing platform providers that do not provide API documentation can lead to a situation where trading businesses are locked in with their vendors, having to source everything from them or from other businesses those vendors are partnered with. At Devexperts, we do not pursue this walled garden approach, preferring to empower our customers to do more with our software. A lot of this work has already been done by our own developers, with a host of ready integrations with everything from market makers and exchanges to payment providers.

Enterprise grade market data

Our DXtrade options trading platform also benefits from access to professional market data via Devexperts subsidiary, dxFeed . dxFeed boasts one of the most comprehensive ticker feeds on the market, offering reliable streaming and historical tick-level data with very low latency.

Market data can often be a pain point for many options traders, with some platforms requiring users to source their own market data feeds for an added monthly fee before being able to make use of all the features being offered.

As seen above, at Devexperts, we have already done a great deal of the legwork, with ready-to-go integrations available for customers of the platform so that when a brokerage offers DXtrade to their customers, they can enjoy an all-in-one experience. The same holds true for the provision of market data.

Want to know more?

To learn more about our options trading solution, the Devexperts development process, or about any of the other brokerage components offered by our business, please reach out to our team .

How to Start a Forex Brokerage Firm

Devexperts — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:49:39 +0000

Key takeaways

You can launch as an introducing broker (IB), go white-label, or build your own brokerage stack—the trade-off is speed vs. control vs. risk.
In 2026, the hardest parts are usually licensing scope, compliance operations, payments, and execution/risk controls, not the trading UI.
A realistic plan includes a timeline, a year-1 cost structure, a minimum tech stack, and the team roles regulators and operations will require.
Starting a forex brokerage can be profitable, but only if you treat it as a regulated financial operation, not a marketing project with a trading app attached. The early work is due diligence: pick a target market, map the licensing path, define how you will process trades (A-book, B-book, or hybrid), and make sure you can run compliance, payments, and risk controls day to day.

In this guide, we break down the three common launch paths, the typical timeline, and what your first-year build actually includes: business setup and staffing, major cost buckets, and the minimum software stack for trading, onboarding, risk management, and operations.

Let’s dive into the topic.

When launching an FX business, you typically choose one of three approaches:

Become an introducing broker (IB)
Opt for a white-label solution
Build a forex brokerage from scratch

Become an introducing broker (IB)

If you want to enter the market without building infrastructure or taking on full regulatory overhead on day one, you can start as an introducing broker (IB). In this model, you focus on marketing, sales, and client relationships, while a licensed primary broker provides the trading platform, liquidity/execution setup, and most operational tooling. You earn revenue through a pre-agreed commission or revenue share tied to the activity of the clients you introduce.

An IB setup can shorten time-to-market, but it also limits control. Your pricing, product scope, onboarding flow, and even how client issues are handled will depend on the primary broker’s policies and risk appetite. It’s a practical route if your advantage is distribution and client acquisition, not technology or dealing operations.

Pros

Fast launch: you can start without building a full brokerage stack or standing up an operations team from scratch
Lower technical load: the primary broker provides the platform, hosting, liquidity/execution, and core integrations
Focus on growth: your main job is client acquisition and retention

Cons

High dependency: your business relies on the primary broker’s commercial terms, platform roadmap, and operational decisions
Limited control: you typically can’t fine-tune execution, risk settings, onboarding, or product coverage to the same extent as a licensed broker
Economics can be volatile: revenue share structures vary, and your net income can swing based on client mix, trading behavior, and the broker’s payout rules

Opt for a white-label solution

If you want to launch quickly under your own brand, a white-label trading platform is a common middle ground between being an IB and building a brokerage from scratch. A white-label provider typically supplies the trading platform and hosting, and may also offer a packaged set of integrations such as liquidity/execution connectivity, market data, payments, and client onboarding tools.

This model can reduce upfront build work and shorten the timeline, but it does not remove the operational reality of running a brokerage. You still need to handle (or outsource) compliance, client support, payment operations, and day-to-day risk monitoring.

Commercially, white-label pricing is often a mix of monthly platform fees plus usage-based costs (accounts, volumes, symbols, add-on modules, support tiers), so the “cheap to start” plan can become expensive as you scale.

Pros

Faster time-to-market: you launch on a proven platform without building core components from scratch
Lower upfront cost: you pay a predictable platform fee instead of funding a full build and infrastructure program
Vendor-managed operations: hosting, upgrades, and baseline maintenance are usually handled by the provider

Cons

Rising costs at scale: fees often increase with active users, volumes, integrations, or support requirements
Limited control: customization, execution/risk tooling, and infrastructure choices are constrained by the provider’s standard package and roadmap
Vendor lock-in risk: migrating away later can be painful if key workflows, integrations, or data models are provider-specific

Build your own forex brokerage firm from scratch

If you want maximum control over pricing, execution, risk settings, product scope, and client experience, you can build your brokerage from scratch. This path takes more time and upfront investment because you’re building (or assembling) an operating model: licensing, compliance processes, banking and payments, execution setup, risk controls, reporting, and a support function that runs every day.

“From scratch” does not always mean writing every component yourself. In 2026, most brokers still start with proven building blocks (trading platform, liquidity connectivity, KYC/AML tooling, payments, reporting) and customize what sets them apart. The key difference from white-label is control: you decide how the stack is structured, how risk is managed, and how the business scales.

Below is an approximate timeline from project start to an official launch.

Pros

Full operational control: you define execution and risk logic, pricing, onboarding, and the product roadmap
Scales on your terms: infrastructure and integrations can be designed for growth and multi-asset expansion
Clear differentiation: you can build a client experience that isn’t limited to a standard package

Cons

Longer timeline and higher upfront cost: licensing, integration work, and operational setup take real time and budget
Higher responsibility: failures in compliance, payments, execution, or risk controls directly impact business continuity

Requires experienced operators: you need strong ownership across compliance, dealing/risk, support, and technology from day one.

Develop your business model

Before you incorporate your company, define the business model you can actually operate. Your target market, product scope, and execution setup will determine licensing, capital requirements, onboarding flows, payments, staffing, and the technology stack you’ll need from day one.

Define your target market

Decide where you will acquire clients and which rules you will be held to. Your target market affects:

What license (or regulatory status) you need
What you can advertise (hence, your forex marketing strategy) and how you can onboard clients
What leverage, risk disclosures, and client protections may be mandatory
Which payment providers and banks will work with you

Decide what asset classes you will offer

Multi-asset can increase retention and volumes, but it also expands your regulatory and operational scope. If you plan to add CFDs, crypto, or spread betting, validate early that your licensing path, banking setup, and compliance tooling support it.

If you offer crypto in the EU, factor in MiCA planning. MiCA’s CASP regime applies from 30 December 2024, with a transitional window for some existing providers that can run until July 1, 2026 (depending on the member state and authorisation status).

Example:

DXtrade is a multi-asset trading platform fit for brokers offering FX, CFDs, crypto, and spread betting, with a packaged approach for launch and later expansion.

In DXtrade Web Trader, users are free to switch between FX and crypto metrics modes, all under the same account.

Choose your trade processing model

Your forex execution model drives both revenue mechanics and risk exposure. Most broker setups fall into one of three approaches:

A-book (STP/agency): orders are passed through to the forex liquidity providers. Revenue is typically spread/commission; market risk is limited, but margins per trade are often lower.
B-book (market maker): you internalize some flow. This can increase revenue, but it requires mature risk controls and disciplined dealing processes.
Hybrid: a mix of A- and B-book by instrument, client segment, or other routing logic.

If you plan to internalize flow (B-book or hybrid), treat the dealing desk and risk layer as core infrastructure. At a minimum, you need real-time exposure monitoring, margin and liquidation logic, client/group risk limits, audit trails, and clear rules for execution and price adjustments.

DXtrade back-office tooling supports configuring trade processing logic (including B-book and STP) at a granular level by instrument and client grouping.

Choose a jurisdiction for your company

Choosing a jurisdiction is not a “cheap vs expensive” decision. Start with where you will market, what you will offer (FX only vs CFDs/crypto), and whether you will hold client money. Then, validate these four points before you spend on incorporation:

License scope and capital rules: minimum capital and ongoing prudential requirements depend on the services you provide and whether you internalize risk.
Local substance: many regulators expect resident directors, local key roles (compliance/MLRO), an office, and evidence that the business is managed from the jurisdiction.
Banking and payments reality: account opening, PSP appetite, chargeback exposure, and settlement flows can make or break a brokerage, regardless of the license.
Continuity risk: sanctions exposure, legal/regulatory volatility, and whether critical providers (banks, PSPs, liquidity, hosting) can keep supporting your setup.

Common jurisdiction routes (and what they usually imply)

Established onshore regimes (higher trust, higher bar)
Examples include the UK, EU jurisdictions (often via Cyprus for FX/CFD brokers), Switzerland, and Hong Kong. These markets tend to provide greater credibility with clients and counterparties, but they also entail more demanding expectations regarding capital, governance, reporting, and local staffing.

In the EU investment-firm framework, initial capital can vary by permitted activities (for example, the €75,000, €150,000, and €750,000 tiers are typical under the IFD/IFR approach).
In Switzerland, securities-firm licensing includes minimum capital expectations and a structured authorization process.
In Hong Kong, licensing and financial resources requirements are explicit and tied to the regulated activity (including leveraged FX).

Offshore financial centers (faster setup, harder day-to-day operations)

Jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands, BVI, and the Bahamas are widely used in financial services and may offer faster incorporation and lighter tax treatment. However, access to banking, payments, and marketing can be more difficult, and many serious counterparties expect stronger substance, governance, and documentation than founders anticipate. Offshore often means you need to prove controls more clearly to banks, PSPs, and liquidity providers.

“Fast-track” licensing destinations (often lower entry cost, rising substance requirements)

Some founders look at “fast-track” jurisdictions like Vanuatu because incorporation and licensing can appear quicker and cheaper than in major onshore markets. However, these regimes have been raising expectations lately: real local presence, clearer governance, stronger compliance documentation, and more evidence that the business is managed responsibly.

Be skeptical of any offer that quotes a single “all-in” number for getting licensed. The real budget is usually a mix of regulator fees, required capital, local substance costs (office, local directors/roles), compliance setup (policies, AML tooling, screening, reporting), and ongoing renewals and audits. Use official regulator guidance and up-to-date fee schedules as your baseline, then budget for the operational work that follows.

Choose a trading platform, software, and technology

A decision about a trading platform is a business decision. A “cheap” platform can become expensive once you add support tiers, upgrades, new modules, integrations, and vendor-managed infrastructure. It can also create vendor lock-in if core workflows, data models, or integrations are specific to one provider.

Modern platforms can reduce the number of add-ons you need at launch, but most brokers still integrate a few core components: liquidity/execution connectivity, market data, payments, KYC/AML tooling, and reporting. The goal is a stack you can operate without fragile glue code.

Some platforms also include optional modules that can reduce operational load, such as client communications tools, education, and copy trading.

Example:

DXtrade integration with Devexa

Minimum technology you’ll need at launch

At a minimum, plan for:

Trading platform (web + mobile access)
Market data and/or liquidity (depending on whether you run STP, market making, or a hybrid model)
CRM for client lifecycle management
Client portal (member’s area) for onboarding, funding/withdrawals, KYC, and account management
Compliance tooling (KYC/AML screening and monitoring, audit trails, reporting workflows) Mobile matters operationally, not just for UX. If your platform offers both web and mobile interfaces, confirm what is synchronized across them (for example, DXtrade materials explicitly mention watchlist synchronization and “interfaces synced in real time” in some product contexts).

Example:

DXtrade mobile trading app

Fit to execution model and risk controls
Choose a platform that supports your order processing model. If you plan to run B-book or hybrid, you need risk controls that work in production: real-time exposure monitoring, margin and liquidation logic, permissions, and audit trails. Your platform provider should be able to support both A-book and B-book workflows where relevant.

Plan for scaling and future control
If your business model assumes growth into new instruments or a more customized operating model, validate how the platform scales and what ownership options exist. Devexperts states that the DXtrade source code can be purchased in some scenarios, which could support bringing development in-house later.

In 2026, “stand out” is less about slogans and more about what clients feel in the first week: onboarding speed, funding reliability, execution quality, and how you handle risk and support when something goes wrong. Pick a small set of differentiators you can deliver consistently and document them in your client-facing disclosures.

Here are practical levers that matter to traders and partners:

Transparent costs and conditions: spreads/commissions, swaps, margin rules, and execution policy explained in plain language.
Execution and stability: fast, predictable order handling, clear slippage rules, and uptime you can demonstrate.
Onboarding and funding: KYC that doesn’t stall, deposits/withdrawals that work, and clear status updates.
Product scope that fits your market: FX-only vs FX+CFDs vs crypto, with a roadmap you can support operationally.
Risk controls that match your model: exposure monitoring, margin and liquidation logic, and audit trails—especially if you run B-book or hybrid.

If you want to incentivize higher volumes, do it with tools you can control and report on. Many broker platforms support rebates and commission plans that can be applied by account/group and configured by volume and schedule (for example, weekly or monthly rebates).

If you need practical guidance on broker operations and automation, Devexperts publishes e-books and guides for brokers on workflows such as operations automation and risk controls.

Hire a team

Your hiring plan should address two constraints simultaneously: what your regulator expects (local substance, named responsible persons) and what the business needs to run day to day. Even with a turnkey platform, you still need owners for compliance, payments, support, and risk.

A minimal functional structure often includes:

Compliance / AML: KYC processes, AML screening and monitoring, reporting, recordkeeping (often including an MLRO role, depending on jurisdiction)
Finance and operations: reconciliation, client money workflows (if applicable), PSP coordination, chargeback handling
Customer support: ticket handling, onboarding support, complaints workflow
Sales/retention: acquisition channels, partner management, CRM discipline
IT/infrastructure: vendor coordination, incident handling, access control, change management
Dealing / risk (if B-book or hybrid): exposure monitoring, risk limits, routing rules, post-trade reviews

Plan training as part of operations, not a one-time onboarding task. You want consistent handling of KYC edge cases, funding issues, execution questions, and risk events—and you want it documented.

Bottomline
To make planning easier, use a simple launch roadmap: jurisdiction and licensing scope, stack selection, onboarding and payments, risk controls, and the minimum team roles you need to operate. You can also use industry guides and broker-focused e-books to align stakeholders on how brokerage operations actually work.

Pro tip: To make it easier for you to plan and launch your forex brokerage business, we’ve created an infographic that highlights all the stages you need to go through.

If you’re a budding FX broker, you can trust us to handle the software part. After all, we’ve been delivering trading platforms to brokers since 2002! So you can be sure we’ll address all your business’s technology needs. Contact us.

Choosing a financial charting library for your trading app: 7 things to look for

Devexperts — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 05:36:18 +0000

If you're building a trading app, we don’t need to give you the spiel about how important the charting component is. You will already know that if it stutters, lags, or looks off, users will often just leave and find a better option.

This post walks you through what to evaluate when picking a library, based on our experience building DXcharts at Devexperts and supporting trading platforms used by millions of users daily.

Can it keep up?
Rendering a few hundred data points is one thing. Rendering tens of thousands of live price bars, indicators, and drawing tools is another.

When building DXcharts, we built our core engine on HTML5 Canvas. That gave us a GPU-accelerated surface for high-density charting.

We can draw tens of thousands of points and user elements in real-time, with smooth panning and zooming. If the library you’re evaluating can’t handle that in a production scenario, it’s going to be a wall that you constantly hit down the line.

Real-time data is a non-neg
Live market data never stops. Every new bar, tick, or user annotation needs to flow seamlessly without glitches.

Look for a charting library that handles data flow in a way that keeps updates smooth, stable, and in sync. DXcharts, for example, is built with this kind of architecture in mind, helping to reduce edge-case bugs and ensure a consistent experience for your users.

Built-in trader features
Run-of-the-mill data visualization tools aren’t always designed with trading in mind. This is something to consider, because your users will expect features like:

Live crosshairs with OHLC and volume
Order markers and trade history
Drag-and-drop lines for stops and take-profits
Real-time annotations and alerts
Synchronized timeframes across multiple instruments

DXcharts includes these out of the box because it was built specifically for financial use. If you’re using a generic library, make sure you think about whether or not you’re ready to build these from scratch, and if so, that it won’t compromise your UX.

How friendly is the DX?
It's highly likely your team will need to develop the charting library further to fit any niche needs that you currently have/or that evolve. This means you need to make sure you’re able to extend it, integrate it, test it, and ship it without it being a mission that derails progress.

How fast can you go from ‘npm install’ to a usable chart?

DXcharts Lite offers a one-day setup with basic charts. The full package includes mobile SDKs for iOS and Android, and supports frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and Vanilla JS. If it isn’t typed, documented, or takes weeks to understand, it may not ship or scale at the pace you need.

Visual accuracy and testing
A pixel shift in a candle or ‘off-by-one’ tooltip can do some damage when a trader has money on the line.

We run end-to-end tests and visual diffs against reference charts to catch anything that might shift layout or break rendering.

If your library doesn’t playback chart screenshots or simulate real user flows, you’ll need to think about building QA tooling yourself.

Flexibility to customize and apply your branding
Ask whether your candidate library makes theming easy at scale, or forces manual overrides for every button and chart element.

DXcharts includes a full Theme Builder and API to customize every aspect of the UI, colors, fonts, logo placement, light and dark modes, without patching stylesheets.

Can it handle custom work?
Most trading apps don’t just plug in a chart and call it a day. They need their own indicators, drawing tools, and ways to tie the chart into other parts of the system.

DXcharts was built with that in mind. You can add your own tools, wire up custom logic, and extend the chart without fighting the framework. It’s flexible enough to handle whatever edge cases your product throws at it.

When choosing your library, ask whether it supports registering custom studies, exposing internal events, or lets you hook into its rendering pipeline.

Final notes: Red flags to spot early

Demo looks fine until you add 20 indicators or live data (test it under load)
No theming API beyond color pickers.
No observable/event stream support (everything fires raw callbacks)
Repo stalled, no recent commits or open issue handling.
Hard to plug custom tools or logic into the core.

There’s a lot of noise out there, and a lot of charting libraries look fine until you try to build something real with them. The safest move is to set up a test project, feed it live data, try a few custom tools, and see how far you can go and what walls emerge.
We’ve spent years building and refining DXcharts, and we’ve hit most of those walls ourselves. If you’re weighing your options, feel free to reach out. We would be happy to give you a demo, trial or more information on how our charting library works.

Behind the Scenes: How We Built a High-Performance Charting Library in React

Devexperts — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:38:12 +0000

DXcharts is a financial charting library built for active trading, one of the toughest UI use cases out there.

With real-time data feeding in every second, and users drawing, panning, zooming, adding indicators, and trading directly from the chart; if it stutters or lags, they’re going to know about it, and then you’re going to know about it. :)

This article talks about how we approached building a fast, interactive charting engine that can handle that load from the ground up.

We’ll go over the early days and the current architecture, decisions we made, how we use functional programming principles, and how we go about optimization and testing.

So, if you’re curious about how to make your UIs render 10,000 points without glitching when money is on the line, this will hopefully be insightful.

The trading-specific genesis

For context, DXcharts falls under Devexperts’ umbrella of products and services, meaning it was not a generic charting tool from the outset. It was built from scratch by Devexperts specifically for powering online trading platforms.

From the beginning, it needed to handle live financial data, heavy user interaction, and offer trading-specific features, with solid reliability.

In one sense, this meant more complexities, but in another, DXcharts was able to take best practices for brokerage systems and feed that into the way they built and designed the interface.
Basically, it needed to be super fast and able to reliably integrate into trading platforms with heavy loads (some of Devexperts' SaaS clients have millions of traders on their platforms each day).

Which brings us to a third point. It also needed to look really good and have a stand-out UX that would attract traders and end-users. Or to put it differently, provide an experience that gives the user everything they could possibly need to prevent them from wondering if the grass is greener somewhere else.

The tech stack, then vs now

The stack has stayed very consistent. The core of the library was built with React, RxJS, TypeScript, and a functional programming mindset.

To summarize, we used:

React for UI
RxJS for reactive streams
TypeScript for safety
fp-ts for functional programming
Styled-components for styling

React

React gave us a clean component-based structure that was easy to adopt and really popular among developers at the time (and still is), which also made sense for hiring and integration/onboarding support.
React also allowed us to break the complex chart UI into reusable pieces, which is a big bonus when you have a high volume of interactive elements on the screen.
Another reason we went with React was because its DOM and diffing algorithm can update the UI in response to streaming data without heavy manual DOM manipulations. It figures out the minimal changes needed to reflect the new state.

TypeScript

Typescript provided static typing to catch bugs early and keep the code base predictable and stable. Both React and Typescript allowed us to scale as we needed.

RxJS

For RxJS, it aligned with the real-time market data components and allowed us to manage asynchronous data streams effectively.

The chart’s state, such as the current view window, the data being displayed, or the cursor position, is represented and managed as a series of observables/stream events.

We have RxJS subjects that emit events for things like new data ticks, user actions, or crosshair movements. Our React components subscribe to these streams and react to them.

Whenever a RxJS observable emits a new value, let's say a price update stream pushes a new bar, it triggers the relevant part of the UI to update.

This reactive design means our components are mostly stateless UI renders, where the state lives in the RxJS layer and flows down to the components. A clear separation is provided so that the data flow is handled by RxJS and the rendering by React.

fp-ts and styled components

We used fp-ts to introduce functional patterns like immutability and monads into our code. Styled components helped make the UI design system maintainable.

The stack now
The stack has, of course, modernized over time. For example, as React introduced hooks and improvements, we refactored parts of our code to use them.

We also use the newer versions of TypeScript, which brings better features and smarter building tools.

But we didn’t scrap anything; the stack is essentially the same, just updated. Which is nice, given it doesn’t often happen that way. In this case, the foundation has served us very well, and we’ve stuck with it.

Other architecture decisions

On the architectural side, we separated the charting system into focused modules, with the most performance-critical part being our chart core that handles the rendering.

HTML 5 Canvas for rendering

Rather than relying on the DOM or SVG for plotting thousands of data points, we built the rendering engine around HTML5 Canvas for pixel-perfect drawing.

We chose Canvas because it excels at drawing large numbers of objects and points, without incurring the overhead of maintaining thousands of DOM nodes.

In a trading chart, it’s common to have tens of thousands of price bars or points on screen, plus annotations and technical indicators. With Canvas, we can draw all of that in a single GPU-accelerated surface.

Once the data is drawn to the canvas, it’s essentially just an image bitmap that the browser can blit to the screen very quickly. This means our charts stay ‘supersonic fast’ (as we market them ;)) even with thousands of bars, hundreds of drawing objects, and dozens of indicators rendered simultaneously.

Writing in a declarative functional style

We took a functional reactive programming approach to designing the chart library’s internals, which isn’t that common in the charting library space.

Most of our code is written in a declarative, functional style rather than imperative.

Our use of the fp-ts library brings in many patterns from functional languages into TypeScript. This gives us things like Option/Either types for safer handling of missing data, immutable data structures, and the ability to compose complex operations in a clear way.

In effect, we are aiming to write ‘pure’ functions for our calculations and state transformations, making the behavior easier to reason about.

Building for extensibility

We chose to build DXcharts as a toolkit. Everything is modular and typed. Clients can bring their own studies, drawing tools, and even tweak the core logic if they need to/want to.

We expose a deep API, and TypeScript helps client autocomplete their way through it.

Devs also have the advantage of IntelliSense and type safety. This helps lower integration errors and makes our library feel like a well-documented framework, rather than a ‘black box’, as they say.

The feedback from clients has been that this flexibility and effort to make the libraries dev-friendly for integrations was a significant reason why they chose us.

Optimization and testing, both for performance and visual

A notable benefit of these architecture decisions is testability. As mentioned, because of the way our core logic encompasses pure functions and streams, we can simulate sequences of events in tests and ensure the system responds correctly.

Over the years of building DXcharts, we’ve performed micro-optimizations in our code.

Examples are things like caching computations, reusing objects to avoid garbage collection churn during rapid updates, and minimizing React state updates by keeping most of the heavy data outside of React components.

We have a great team behind DXcharts that is taking a lot of care to write efficient code. Performance testing includes real scenarios to test at scale, like opening 10 charts with 10,000 data points each and ensuring interactions remain fluid.

Visual testing with Playwright and e2e

For visual testing, we use Playwright for both end-to-end flows and visual regression tests. We generate reference charts and diff them against current renders to try and catch even the tiniest layout or rendering bugs.

This level of testing might be considered a bit unique in the industry for a charting library, but as we laid out in the intro, given the financial nature of what’s at stake, it has been a standard for us.

Plus, it also gives the client’s devs confidence that our updates won’t unexpectedly change behavior or visuals.

Last thoughts

Building DXcharts has been a long process of thoughtful architecture, functional discipline, and constant performance tuning.

Upon reflection, the things that were instrumental in successfully achieving our goals were the core stack we chose and stuck with, focusing on modularity, investing in testability, and, of course, have to mention the dedicated team behind DXcharts.

If you're building anything that needs to move fast and scale cleanly, even if it’s not charts, hopefully you’ve found something useful in here that can help you succeed with your own project.

Feel free to check out the charts here. We also have other case studies that talk about specific features and different formats and iterations of DXcharts.

How to Start a Prop Trading Firm: Ins and Outs

Devexperts — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:21:00 +0000

All thanks to ESMA’s tightening of CFD trading regulations, a growing number of FX and CFD brokers started looking into adding prop trading to their business models or even switching to prop trading altogether. This has resulted in a booming prop trading industry: prop trading firms aren’t heavily regulated as they provide their trading funds to clients and then share profits.

Whether you want to start your prop trading firm or add a prop trading offering to your existing brokerage, the best time is now. This article will explain how you can set up a prop trading business quickly and easily. But, as usual, let’s dive into the basics first.

What is prop trading?

Proprietary trading (aka prop trading) is a form of trading or investment when a trader or investor is provided with funds by a broker to make a profit. Before a broker provides funds, a trader must go through an evaluation process to prove their skills. A prop trading firm only offers access to real funds after a trader completes this trial.

How to start a prop trading firm?

Starting a prop trading business is pretty straightforward:

Get in the loop about the financial industry, get proficient in trading and investing, and work out your high-level business ideas.
Get into details—transform your high-level ideas into a comprehensive business plan that includes your objectives and strategy.
Register your company according to local regulations.
Find and set up trading technology you’ll offer your clients and use to manage your exposure.
Hire your staff to run the dealing department, helpdesk, marketing, etc.
Develop your marketing strategy, launch a website, and start attracting clients.
Work out a risk management strategy and target clients that need to be hit during the evaluation process.

Learning about the industry

Before diving into the prop trading business, it’s worth doing comprehensive research and talking to those already involved in the prop trading scene. It’s also crucial to learn the regulations of your target markets from A to Z and track all changes.

If you’re not that well-versed in legal matters, work with consultants and lawyers. The associated costs will pay off when your reputation is squeaky clean, as you’ll work strictly within legal frameworks. This will help avoid fines and legal issues and attract clients, as they know you run a reputable and reliable business.

Working out a detailed business strategy

Meticulous planning is key to escaping surprises during the implementation stage. Plan out the technology you’ll need, how much it costs, how many people you need to hire, how much you need for their payroll, and just how much you need to keep the lights on.

Do proprietary trading firms need a license?

Prop trading firms are less heavily regulated than regular brokerages and broker-dealers. However, if such laws apply, you must still properly register your business and get licensed.

For example, in the US, CFD trading is prohibited, and you can only offer prop trading of exchange-traded securities. To be able to do that, you’ll need to adhere to the US prop trading regulations and get licenses from the SEC and FINRA.

Finding the right technology

An easy, affordable, and bullet-proof way to launch a prop trading business is via a prop trading platform. It provides all the tools for managing clients and exposure and professional experience for your traders.

How can Devexperts help?

At Devexperts, we offer a complete package for prop trading startups and brokers wanting to add prop trading to their offerings. Our white-label prop trading platform is based on the DXtrade trading platform, includes everything mentioned above, and allows you to launch at a cost-effective rate in a week.

We call DXtrade the whole package because it comes with all essential integrations, including CRM, market data, and liquidity providers.

You can learn more about why trading software is at the core of white-label prop firms in this article about the challenges of prop trading firms.

How much does it cost to set up a prop firm?

It depends on the location and your target market, but if we’re not talking about the US, then as little as $15,000 might do—for example, the basic DXtrade package costs just $5,000. The rest of the funds are required for all the measures described above.

Most prop trading firms provide access to real funds only after carefully evaluating their traders’ abilities, and traders usually have to pay a sign-up fee before entering the trial process. In some cases, proprietary trading firms provide access to live trading for a certain fee, but the funds provided aren’t substantial, and monitored trading metrics are strict.

Are prop trading firms profitable?

The profitability of prop trading firms directly correlates to their ability to attract clients, keep them engaged, and keep traders within imposed risk exposure limits.

The latter is easily implemented with the right prop trading technology with real-time exposure monitoring. Brokers should set up maximum drawdowns, so if your client loses more than a predefined percentage of their initial account balance, all their positions will be automatically closed. The client will have access to their account in read-only mode.

It’s also necessary to indicate profit targets. This setting ensures your clients don’t win more than a specific percentage of their initial account balance. If a client’s account value exceeds the initially added percentage threshold, all their positions will be automatically closed.

This way, prop trading firms ensure they stay profitable.

Attracting and retaining clients is another challenge that needs tackling from the marketing department. A clear branding strategy, a strong reputation, and positive reviews from existing clients might help. Regular trading contests are a mighty tool for prop trading firms to engage clients.

Conclusion

That’s our take on how to start a prop trading firm. As with any other brokerage business, it requires careful planning, thorough research, and adherence to local regulations. A prop trading firm can thrive in the current market with the right strategy, technology, and risk management plan.You can simplify the process and provide access to all necessary tools and integrations cost-effectively if you get a white-label prop trading platform like our DXtrade.

The post How to Start a Prop Trading Firm: Ins and Outs appeared first on Devexperts Blog.

How to Launch a Cryptocurrency Exchange

Devexperts — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 15:11:05 +0000

As of August 2024, the global crypto market value is $2.37 trillion.

The crypto world went through a lot in the past two years. Major crypto exchanges were either eliminated or went through a rude awakening that shattered investors’ trust. Authorities worldwide tighten regulations.

Still, over this year, Bitcoin and Ethereum have bounced back, and we can be sure that the crypto winter we’ve experienced is over. Cryptocurrencies are yet again solid and stable investments for people who are interested in digital assets.

Starting a crypto exchange business might be a good idea now. But before diving into details, let’s go through the basics.

What is a crypto exchange?

A crypto exchange is a marketplace where cryptocurrencies and their derivatives are traded. It serves as a platform that connects buyers and sellers, facilitating the fiat for crypto and crypto for crypto exchange.

Depending on the region of operation, an exchange might need to get licensed with a regulator.

What software do you need to create a crypto exchange?

You need to take care of multiple software components to launch and run a crypto exchange.

Matching engine

An exchange needs an order matching engine to match buy and sell orders from market participants to facilitate the execution of trades. When choosing matching software, it’s worth remembering that cryptocurrency exchanges favor throughput over latency. The main clientele of a crypto exchange is retail customers who don’t practice high-frequency trading, so there’s no point in chasing sub-minimal latency. However, retail clients may rush to enter positions during crypto market turbulence, thus the importance of throughput.

Take for example the Devexperts DXmatch proprietary matching engine. It has been successfully tested by a variety of recognized benchmarks to ensure great throughput, including a 1M order set. DXmatch has also proven very resilient during the maximum load times. All of that combined and with ultra-low latency to boot.

Pro tip: You can learn more about matching engines in general and, in particular, crypto matching needs in this article.

Admin panel

The trading and matching system must have an admin panel that enables operational officers to monitor the system’s performance and make necessary manual adjustments as and when required.

Continuing with our DXmatch example, it has a feature-rich admin panel that allows crypto platform personnel to make configurations, keep tabs on trading operations, and intervene when the need arises. A highlight of the DXmatch admin panel is the Markets Overview dashboard where operators can view the daily count of trades, top crypto pairs, and order rate graph.

Liquidity

There are four primary sources of crypto liquidity: centralized exchanges (CEXs), decentralized exchanges (DEXs), market makers and institutional trading firms, and over-the-counter (OTC) trading desks. As a crypto exchange owner, you’ll be able to accumulate your liquidity over time. Still, it’s worth integrating with other liquidity providers in times of low liquidity or demand for a wide range of assets.

User interface

Aspiring crypto exchange runners must know their target audience well. The fact with crypto traders is that they don’t fancy outdated and complex trading platforms. They need modern and easy-to-use interfaces that are suitable for use right away. This goes both for web and mobile crypto trading UIs.

Cryptocurrency wallets

A crypto wallet is necessary to enable trading on a crypto exchange. Investors use it to deposit and withdraw crypto and fiat currencies.

Legal framework

Crypto trading regulations vary depending on the market you want to target. We have a nifty infographic on regulating crypto exchanges worldwide in this article about order matching.

We strongly recommend adhering to AML and KYC procedures and studying your market’s local regulations. For example, the EU has introduced Mica regulation in June 2023. There’s also a long-standing MiFID II framework. The US is on the path to regulate cryptocurrencies, too.

So, if you intend to lead a fair business, get ready to dig into legal hurdles.

Protection and security

The amounts of crypto stolen from exchanges and personal user wallets are massive. Ensuring maximum security will help you protect your business and indicate to your clients that you care about their funds.

Every crypto exchange should have multi-factor authentication and secure connections to custodians for crypto withdrawals and deposits.

How to start your own crypto business?

After dealing with all legal matters, each crypto startup needs to pick software to run the business. We went over this numerous times: there are turnkey options and a path of custom cryptocurrency exchange development. Currently, there’s no point in going for custom software for a crypto exchange. By the time it’s ready, you’ll find yourself in another crypto winter and totally out of money.

We’ve written an elaborate article comparing custom and out-of-the-box software so you can decide for yourself. But our advice is to go for a white-label crypto exchange.

What is a white-label crypto exchange?

A white-label crypto exchange is a ready-made solution with short-time-to-market delivery. Good white-label software comes with a whole package you need to launch: a matching engine, an admin panel, integration with liquidity providers, web and mobile apps, several hosting options, and sometimes even maintenance and support.

DXtrade Crypto is a ready-to-use fully white-label platform that comes with everything you need to start and run your crypto brokerage

Some white-label providers of white-label labels can also introduce customizations (e.g., widgets tailored to your specific business flow), but they come at additional costs.

How long does it take to build a crypto exchange?

With a white-label crypto exchange solution, it takes only a week to launch if you’ve already sorted out all the legal hurdles and hired a team. By the way, you can learn how to assemble a team for your exchange by reading this article.

Devexperts offers the entire set of white-label software to launch a crypto exchange in mere days. Our DXmatch matching engine also comes with an admin panel for exchange staff. As a frontend, we offer DXtrade Crypto—a white-label crypto trading platform with a modern and intuitive interface.

DXtrade Crypto comes with turnkey integrations with crypto liquidity providers and crypto wallets, so you don’t have to worry about any technological aspect.

The DXmatch and DXtrade Crypto exchange ecosystem allows trading margin and spot cryptocurrencies and crypto CFDs. The ecosystem will fully support and facilitate your growth if you expand your asset offering with, for example, FX pairs or spread bets.

Our offering is secure, scalable, and has room for customizations. It’s also worth noting that both DXmatch and DXtrade Crypto are equipped with robust risk management, which provides a safety net to protect the exchange from accidents.

Summary: How to start an exchange for cryptocurrency?

To draw a bottom line, starting a cryptocurrency exchange can be a profitable business venture as of the end of 2024. However, it requires thorough preparation and attention to legal compliance.

Before you make any software purchase, define your target market and audience, exchange model, software and liquidity providers, and promotional strategy. Selecting the right liquidity providers and investing in marketing and promotion can quickly bring your marketplace to a solid industry level.

If you’re interested in starting a cryptocurrency exchange with an experienced software vendor that provides tried-and-tested white-label solutions, reach out to Devexperts.

Pro tip: To make it easier for you to plan and launch your crypto exchange business, we’ve created an infographic that highlights some estimations and key metrics.

The post How to Launch a Cryptocurrency Exchange appeared first on Devexperts Blog.

Order Matching Engine: Everything You Need to Know

Devexperts — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:47:44 +0000

Order matching engines are the backbone of modern financial markets, facilitating the seamless execution of trades. Understanding their function and significance is crucial for each market participant.

In this article, we’ll give you an insight into what an order matching engine is, the mechanics behind it, and what to pay attention to when choosing one for your exchange or dark pool.

Price discovery at a glance

Trading venues such as exchanges and over-the-counter markets are crucial to the frictionless exchange of assets such as stocks, commodities, and cryptocurrencies, as well as derivatives such as futures, options, and more.

Their purpose is to create a level playing field on which market participants can access price information to buy and sell securities. The willingness of traders to buy or sell an asset at a predefined volume and price is logged by these venues, forming public “order books” for each tradable symbol.

As traders enter and exit the market, buying and selling at the current best price (the top of the order book), their “market” orders are filled from these “limit” orders stored in the order book.

Every time a trade is made, the balance between the best available buy/sell prices and volumes thereof is altered as liquidity is removed, thus setting a new prevailing market price. This is what market participants mean when they talk about price discovery.

What is an order matching engine?

An order matching engine (OME) is a software system that matches buy and sell orders from market participants to facilitate the execution of trades.

In other words, the matching engine is what allows all the above to take place, leading to the creation of efficient global markets on which vast amounts of liquidity can change hands each day. All other exchange systems can be regarded as peripheral to the matching engine because without it there is effectively no market to speak of.

Regardless of the asset class your trading venue specializes in, you’ll require a matching engine in order to fulfill incoming market orders for immediate execution with liquidity from limit orders in the order book.

We’ve already discussed the order book, which is one of the main parts of a matching engine. At the heart of it all we have the matching algorithm, which performs most of the heavy lifting when it comes to order execution.

The matching algorithm follows predefined rules that determine which orders are prioritized in their execution and how.

An example of such rules is Price-Time Priority. This is one of the most popular order matching rulesets in which orders are matched according to their price and the time they were placed. Also known as FIFO (first in, first out), the oldest order at a particular price level will be prioritized in this ruleset over newer orders at the same price.

Pro-Rata is a different set of matching rules under which the matching algorithm prioritizes larger orders, providing them with a proportionally larger share of the available liquidity at a given price level.

What to keep in mind when choosing a matching engine?

Choosing the right matching engine is a critical decision that requires careful evaluation. Let’s have a look at some factors you need to consider.

Asset classes

Right off the bat, it’s important to know which asset classes your trading venue will be offering.

Not all matching engines are compatible with every asset class. Of course, there are multi-asset matching engines, like DXmatch, that are completely agnostic to the underlying assets they work with. That’s why they can be easily used on all conventional markets and even some unconventional ones, like prediction markets.

Order types

Ensure that the matching engine supports common order types like Limit, Stop, Stop Limit, and Market orders. Check if specialized order types like Trailing Stops, One-Cancels-the-Other (OCO), and Iceberg orders are available or planned for future implementation.

Find out if a prospective provider can offer these, or whether they have a roadmap in place for adding this functionality at a later date.

Latency considerations

Another crucial aspect of your matching engine, which will also be determined by your clientele, is its performance characteristics.

How important is latency to your business? For example, institutions deploying high-frequency trading strategies require as close to zero latency as the laws of physics will allow.

In these applications, bare metal systems that are co-located in exchange data centers are essential. In these cases, even the shortness of the cables used to connect client servers to exchange matching engines can confer a minuscule advantage on one participant over another.

Throughput and availability

On the other side of the spectrum, we have venues such as cryptocurrency exchanges, which are far less concerned with latency. These venues are overwhelmingly used by retail clients, so the allowances for this type of trading venue are radically different from the HFT example above.

Retail exchanges in general tend to favor throughput over latency as they have extensive client bases that may all want to enter positions at certain times, such as during the frenzy of a crypto bull market.

In our own DXmatch solution, we use clusters of independent order processing units (replicated state machines), all equal copies of one another in order to maintain high availability in a cloud environment. In the case of throughput, we employ horizontal scaling by splitting the venue’s available instruments into multiple segments, each with its own copy of the matching engine.

Our DXmatch engine can be installed in both a bare metal server setup, or deployed on the cloud for businesses whose latency requirements are not as strict, and that value the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing over bare metal.

It’s important to note that while high availability and throughput can be maintained with a cloud-based setup, it’s extremely difficult to get order processing latency under 100 milliseconds with a cloud deployment.

As mentioned above, this is just not viable in certain applications. Using an advanced bare metal setup, our own DXmatch engine can deliver wall-to-wall latency of under 100 microseconds via FIX API.

Connectivity

This brings us to connectivity protocols, which bring together different parts of the exchange infrastructure and allow it to connect to external third parties.

Evaluate the connectivity protocols offered by the matching engine to enable seamless integration with external third parties like market data providers, custodians, clearing agents, regulators, settlement systems, and both custodial and non-custodial crypto wallet management providers. REST and FIX APIs are industry standards.

Admin features

Finally, we have user-facing administration software for monitoring and manually intervening when necessary.

Ensure that the matching engine provides user-friendly administration software for monitoring and intervention. This software should allow easy visualization of activities on the exchange and include controls like a kill switch to cancel orders or mass cancel features.

For example, a kill switch to cancel existing orders and prevent new ones from a participant that has been identified as a bad actor, or a mass cancel feature, allowing administrators to cancel all open orders pertaining to an individual symbol, or entire asset class.

Experience DXmatch, a matching engine by Devexperts

DXmatch is Devexperts’ proprietary order matching engine designed for ultra-low latency and high throughput applications. It is trusted by regulated securities exchanges, dark pools, cryptocurrency exchanges, and OTC venues worldwide.

With DXmatch, you can build an exchange from scratch and offer a wide range of underlying assets, including stocks, bonds, futures, options, cryptocurrencies, and non-standard assets like NFTs, real estate, and prediction markets. It ensures regulatory compliance and supports swap contract execution.

Advantages of DXmatch

Ultra-low latency engine

DXmatch ensures high-performance order matching with sub-100 microseconds latency. This level of speed allows for faster execution of trades, making it suitable for high-frequency trading strategies that require near-zero latency.

Scalable engine

The DXmatch engine is designed to scale horizontally meaning that its throughput increases linearly with horizontal scaling. This scalability ensures that the engine can handle a growing number of transactions without compromising performance.

DXmatch supports multi-segment setup allowing for efficient management and execution of multiple trading segments simultaneously. With a capacity of 30,000 matches per segment, DXmatch can handle high volumes of trades across various segments.

Engine to deploy anywhere

DXmatch can be easily deployed on different platforms, including bare metal servers or cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud. This flexibility allows trading venues to choose the deployment option that best suits their needs and infrastructure.

Migrate hassle-free to a new engine

DXmatch provides a guided path for migrating working orders from legacy engines to its platform. This migration process ensures a smooth transition and minimizes disruptions during the switch to DXmatch.

“In the ever-expanding world of financial markets, DXmatch stands out as the ultimate solution. Our experience with clients is a clear demonstration of our unwavering commitment to innovation and adaptability.”

– Sergey Samushin, Project Manager of DXmatch

Engine for trading derivatives

DXmatch supports trading derivatives allowing trading venues to expand their offerings beyond cryptocurrencies. This capability enables the inclusion of derivative products in the exchange’s portfolio.

Multi-leg trading

DXmatch enables the execution of multi-leg trading strategies allowing users to create complex strategies within the engine itself. This feature enhances trading flexibility and efficiency.

Enterprise-grade APIs

DXmatch offers high-quality APIs including the FIX 5.0 protocol that provide market access with sub-100 microseconds latency. These APIs also support mass cancels and mass quoting, catering to the needs of market makers.

Risks mitigation

DXmatch is a modular platform equipped with advanced risk management features. These include price slippage limits, built-in fat finger protection, kill switch, self-trade prevention, message throttling, min/max quantity validation and min/max price validation. The features safeguard your customers and protect your business adding value to your clients and ensuring that your business remains protected even in worst-case scenarios.

In summary, DXmatch offers a number of advantages, such as ultra-low latency, scalability, multi-segment setup, deployment flexibility, smooth migration process, support for derivatives, multi-leg trading, and enterprise-grade APIs. These features make DXmatch a powerful and reliable choice for trading venues and exchanges seeking an efficient and high-performance order matching engine.

The main components of Matching Engine

Console UI

The Console UI application within DXmatch provides a user-friendly interface for monitoring and administering orders on an exchange. It offers several functions that assist exchange administrators in managing and overseeing trading activities.

Market data

The Market Data Feed service offers the ability to receive real-time updates about the trading information such as quotes, last traded price, volumes and others. Common usages of this API include web-based trading systems (widgets like Watchlist or Market Depth) and public websites.

The information distributed by this service is not personalized, and there is no way to link events from the Market Data Feed to a specific market participant.

The Market Data Feed is designed to provide the latest market information rather than all events occurring in the market.

FIX API

DXmatch FIX Port application operates in two functional modes:

Trading mode. Gives access to the DXmatch exchange market by placing and managing orders.
Drop Copy mode. Allows to distribute real-time copies of order execution reports.

REST API

The API provides endpoints for trading and exchange management:

Trading – placing, modifying, and canceling orders via the Matching Engine.
Historical data – requesting historical orders data, related execution reports, and fills from the Data Warehouse.
Instruments management – listing new tradable instruments and managing instrument parameters.
The flagship of our exchange product ecosystem, DXmatch is unrivaled on the market. Often imitated, never duplicated, we are certain that it has to be seen in action to be believed, and so we’d like you to experience the power of DXmatch by taking it for a spin!

The post Order Matching Engine: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Devexperts Blog.

Flutter, Flutter Little Bat: Is Cross-Platform Development Finally for Everyone?

Devexperts — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 11:22:08 +0000

We’ve recently seen lot of discussion concerning Flutter, specifically, whether it’s the new silver bullet (spoiler alert: it’s not) of mobile development, or if it’s just another awful cross-platform framework that allows developers to build sub-par applications, while putting in little to no effort (second spoiler alert: you will have a bad app with minimal effort, but the framework isn’t to blame). I’ve decided to write a few words on Flutter, as well as cross-platform approaches overall and how they fit in with Fintech and trading apps in particular. Let’s see how they stack up.

For starters, Flutter is a mobile cross-platform development framework that in theory, allows you to write the app once and run it on multiple platforms, mainly, iOS and Android. From there, you could write a web app using the same codebase, but I’ll try to stick to mobile to keep it simple for now.

Given that the idea is pretty promising, Flutter is not the first attempt to make it work. Today, Microsoft has Xamarin, Facebook has ReactNative, even Devexperts used to have a cross-platform framework with a less fancy name, called MOBUI at one point in time. So, Google decided they needed their own technology, targeting the same goal, but that addressed a few of the weakest points of cross-platform development.

So, let’s have a brief look under the hood.

Flutter compiles into the native binaries on both platforms. These binaries are then called from the respective application wrapper, which then provides your app with the canvas to draw on, as well as all the inputs you’d typically receive from the user or the external world. This is sort of a gamedev-style approach to the interaction with the underlying OS, aside from the framework built on top of that.

The thing to mention is that Flutter uses the Dart programming language. It’s not widely used in the industry, but that’s no problem. Syntax-wise, Dart is absolutely familiar to anyone who knows Java, Kotlin or Swift. Of course it has some minor, convenient features; but that said, it does not prevent developers from figuring out how the code works right away.

On top of that, Flutter provides developers with a rich and beautiful UI kit, including a set of ready-to-go widgets. Even though none of them have anything to do with the native controls, they are designed to look exactly like the native ones. So we have both Material(Android-like) and Cupertino(iOS-like) controls. More on that later.

What does this all mean in practice? Several things:

The UI can be super fast and responsive, given the framework’s low operational overhead.
There is no “magic” happening, unlike ReactNative or Xamarin – no virtual machine, no intermediate code generation – the code written is the code run. Which is good news both in terms of debugging and performance profiling.
It is pretty easy to kick-start application development using Flutter. Moreover, it’s simple to sketch a great (and even native)-looking UI for both platforms.

But let’s get back to Dart. Aside from the syntax, I didn’t mention one thing yet: Dart is a single-threaded language. It is designed to operate on top of the event loop, allowing you to perform asynchronous operations. For the most part, that’s what developers need. This approach not only simplifies memory management, but also guards you against all the concurrency problems developers can face.

While that all sounds good as it addresses a lot of the development pain, it’s still not a one-size-fits-all solution. The thing is, the simpler your application, the higher the chances technology like Flutter will fit your use case. Here I would totally agree with Juhani Lehtimäki from Snapp, who gives us this awesome diagram:

The simpler your application, the higher the chances technology like Flutter will fit your use case. Credit: Juhani Lehtimäki, https://medium.com/snapp-mobile/the-fundamental-problems-with-cross-platform-frameworks-cea57ac18fef

And this is not a bad thing at all. Today we are seeing a widespread demand for super simple apps. If the industry becomes capable of creating these apps cheaper and faster, more businesses will be able to afford a modern and sleek app – and more importantly, to support it over a period of time without paying for two separate apps individually.

On the topic of more sophisticated mobile solutions, let’s have a look at what does not work so well to the right of the orange dashed line.

The first topic would be the single-threaded asynchronous approach versus concurrency. The first one will definitely work if your app doesn’t load or compute the data dynamically. It might be an app consisting of pre-composed static content, or a basic fetch-and-display application. For instance we have a list of , each one has a separate page with the details and actions. We load this list once, and work with it. We can change the filter and reload the list once in a while, but that does not change the picture dramatically.

Now, imagine the other extreme: real-time data streaming to the app, changing the values multiple times a second. Also imagine having a mathematical model that combines both user input and the streaming data and updates the values of a number of the fields on the screen, as well as their existence. Now you live in my world!

In order to achieve this while making the process fast and fluid, you need a number of things. First, an asynchronous data transfer protocol. You need a way to explicitly specify which logic can run on the main thread, and which might be unpredictably slow and must be moved out. Second, you need a way to orchestrate all this. In other words, you need more control. Flutter wasn’t designed for this.

Could you still do it? Oh you could.. You could work with multiple Isolates. Or you could write this natively and leverage the interop, which is workable in this case. The main hesitation is whether this approach would pay off. To put it simply, this is a tool that doesn’t fit the use case. All these “overly complex” multithreading concepts, such as shared memory, atomic transactions, synchronization, concurrent algorithms and data structures, are here for a reason. In the real world, we have tons of cases where the developer needs them to create a working code. As the complexity of the app grows, the probability you’ll need more control becomes more and more significant.

Real-time data streaming to the app, changing the values multiple times a second (a watchlist of forex pairs on iPhone)

But suppose you don’t have loads of real-time data. If you have an app that doesn’t do any crazy real-time stuff, probably be fine living in a single-threaded asynchronous world. Are things any different? Yes and no. Yes, because we have one less issue No, because in any application development fields, you’ll see the same picture: At some point on a complexity scale, a generic cross-platform solution doesn’t provide you enough control to allow your program to work flawlessly.

For example, back to the Flutter widget packs: Material and Cupertino. Why two? In order to create a beautiful app, you have to respect the platform’s native UI and UX. So while you could pick and choose only one of them, this is not the best possible solution. That said, you need both – one that will look great on iOS and another for Android. This means you’ll basically have to write the code at the UI level twice. But then doesn’t that sound like native mobile development?

Why doesn’t Flutter do this automatically? In short, it needs to respect the nuances of the platforms to do so – just like the developer – and that is not a trivial task. Or ignore them and compromise the user experience. The developer could do the same thing to optimize the cost or length of the project. It’s an option – one to choose sometimes, but this is a trade-off, not a silver bullet.

By this point, I risk sounding like my dad trying to prove to the younger generation that music from my days was better. But let’s take a closer look at the industry to see if I’m alone here.

As we know, Airbnb has sunsetted ReactNative, and Udacity removedeverything written in the same technology shortly after. More interestingly, Facebook, the company behind ReactNative, was rewriting the Messenger app from the ground up. Did they go the cross-platform route, given their expertise? No, they decided to go native for some very valid reasons.

Speaking of Flutter and Google, they have made one relatively straightforward AdMob application using this technology, while keeping everything else native. The thing is, AdMob is specifically a fetch-and-display application, for which Flutter makes perfect sense. But it doubtedly makes sense for most others.

As a final word on Flutter, I’d say it’s a great tool for making simple and stylish applications very fast. A market for these kinds of apps does exist; and on that market, Flutter might be unbeatable. But would it change the mobile development landscape forever? I highly doubt it.

What if you still like the idea of writing once instead of multiple times? The point is, you can do all that for the code that doesn’t immediately interact with the user or the operating system itself. So for example, if you have a mathematical model calculating something to show the resulting numbers to the user, you can do it. We have several ways to achieve this.

First, as much is possible, move the common logic to the server-side. But in doing so comes clear limitations.There is a network between the user and the logic. Which could lead to latency and slow loading times for large data sets.

Second, there are ways to reuse the logic on the client-side while keeping apps native. Each approach is not universal and has its limitations, but deserves evaluation.

Since September, Kotlin Multiplatform for mobile goes Alpha, which, given it is Alpha, has some limitations that don’t suit us, but could work well for other cases.

We are currently using j2Objc to reuse Java-code compiled as an Obj-C library for iOS. Of course, Java and Obj-C don’t sound fancy in the world of Swift and Kotlin, but this is a well-established solution proven to work even for very complex use cases.

And finally, it’s possible to share C++ libraries, but in our experience dealing with JNI complexities, platform specifics and lower-level programming language doesn’t seem to pay off.

The post Flutter, Flutter Little Bat: Is Cross-Platform Development Finally for Everyone? appeared first on Devexperts Blog.

Getting to the bottom of the RGB pixels. Part 1: Color difference

Devexperts — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 12:42:46 +0000

Introduction

Devexperts Quality Assurance team is happy to update you about our latest news: we are beginning to open-source our internal projects with SUITCase – a great tool for screenshot testing of iOS and iPadOS apps¹.

The main idea of SUITCase is to provide many different comparing strategies. It does not only support testing with pixel by pixel accuracy. Also, it can tolerate minor color differences or completely ignore the color hue. The way to calculate the color difference and the light intensity is not as obvious as it might seem. In this article, we will tell you about the different approaches to calculating the color difference between two colors and why it is important in screenshot testing.

Problem

Let’s suppose we test Apple’s Health application. We have recorded the reference screenshots on iOS 13.0 and want to run screenshots tests a few versions later – on simulators running iOS 13.5. The next screenshots show the Health app on these two versions. How many user interface changes can you see?

The screenshots of Apple’s Health app on iOS 13.0 and 13.5.

Some changes are more noticeable than others. For example, the Browse button in the tab bar became bigger to match the Summary button. The little arrows to the right of the category cells are thinner while retaining their color. Speaking of color, have you noticed the Mindfulness icon’s different hue?

The next image shows all of the changes made. The pixels that do not match are displayed with #000000 color, while the remaining are #FFFFFF.

The graphical difference between the screenshots of Health app.

The texts in the navigation bar slightly changed their position. While it is hard to see on the side-by-side comparison, we can notice it if we position one screenshot on the top of the other and change their order repeatedly. There are also minor changes to some of the other icons. The last significant difference is the Activity icon’s hue.

The difference between colors of iOS 13.0 and 13.5.

Let’s compare the Activity and Mindfulness icons’ color changes.

The difference between Vermillion and Orange is barely visible, while Robin’s Egg Blue is easy to distinguish from Malibu. We don’t want to treat minor color differences the way we pay attention to much more noticeable changes. Also, we don’t want to receive false-negative test results because of nearly invisible changes.

So, how should we calculate the color difference?

Color difference

Let’s quickly refresh the things we know about RGB pixels. The colors of RGB spaces are relatively easy to display because the majority of modern screens (including iOS and iPadOS devices) use physical RGB pixels. All you have to do is to mix three additive primary colors (red, green, and blue). The 24-bit RGB model allows us to create about 16.7 million colors mixed with the 256 discrete levels of each color component².

What is the difference between the two colors in the 24-bit RGB model? We have two points in a three-dimensional space (called the color cube), so the Euclidian distance (ΔCE) should be alright.

The problem is the human eye does not perceive colors the way electronic devices display them. We differentiate shades of green more effectively than shades of blue and red³ (even if it is hard to name them⁴). Our ancestors lived in a green world, and our eyes have not adapted to the modern world yet. To improve the color components’ contribution, we should use a weighted sum instead of a simple sum before calculating the square root.

There is a great article in CompuPhase⁵ that suggests two ways to calculate weighted Euclidean distance functions. The first one (ΔC1) uses two fixed sets of weights depending on the mean of the red components’ values. If the mean is less than a half, the function adjusts the blue components’ difference more than the red components’. If the mean is high, it values the red components’ contribution more.

The difference between the green components is the top priority in both cases.

There is another explanation to this approach – we can use a simple Euclidian distance but in the modifications of the color cube. The color cube stretches to form two color parallelepipeds.

The second way to calculate the color difference (ΔC2) transforms the color cube smoothly. Instead of using two fixed sets of weights, it applies more precise weights.

Let’s compare the three approaches mentioned above. The next image shows five colors.

The colors we want to compare.

We will calculate the color difference between Lemon and four other colors – Tangerine, Banana, Asparagus, and Lime. Which color do you think is the closest to the Lemon? And which one is the least similar?

The next image shows the color differences calculated by three methods. The results are normalized to make the differences between #000000 and #FFFFFF equal to 1.

The calculated differences of colors.

According to results, all three formulae tell us that Asparagus is the most distant color to Lemon. But what about the closest? The simple Euclidian distance (ΔCE) is the least for the Tangerine, and the first weighted distance (ΔC1) says the Lime is the most similar to Lemon. The limes and lemons are greatly similar in the matter of taste, but according to the majority of our QA team, the two most similar colors are Lemon and Banana. The second weighted distance (ΔC2) proves it.

There are other more precise methods, but they require converting RGB pixels to other representations⁶. Such conversions lead to more calculations, so we chose ΔC2 as a color difference calculation method for SUITCase.

Result

Let’s go back to the example in the beginning.

Now we know how to calculate the difference between Orange and Vermillion which equals 0.08, while the difference between Malibu and Robin’s Egg Blue is much higher and equals 0.193. Let’s see how choosing the color difference threshold (T), that separates matching and non-matching pixels, affects the testing stability. The next image shows non-matching pixels for T ∈ {0.05, 0.1, 0.2}.

You can see how increasing a threshold leads to a smaller amount of non-matching pixels. Our screenshot testing tool SUITCase allows users to configure this threshold which equals 0.1 by default.

Conclusion

Ignoring minor color differences allows us to increase our screenshot testing stability. You can try this feature right now as the code is available on GitHub¹, and we will be happy for your feedback.

We hope this article will help you to improve your screenshot testing, even if you develop tests for other target platforms.

Take our little quiz to know how good you are in differentiating colors:

https://forms.gle/ZBjRVqd1P7VVv2mz8

Which tools do you use to automate screenshot testing? How do you treat minor color differences?

References:

1. Devexperts team. “devexperts/suitcase”. A Public Repository on GitHub, Devexperts LLC, 2020, github.com/devexperts/suitcase
2. Michael Stokes, Matthew Anderson, Srinivasan Chandrasekar, and Ricardo Motta. “A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet: sRGB”. International Color Consortium, ICC, 1996, color.org/sRGB.xalter
3. Adeel Mahmood Javaid. “Why does the human eye see more shades of green than any other colour?”. A Personal Blog on LinkedIn, Adeel Mahmood Javaid, 2016, linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-human-eye-see-more-shades-green-than-any-other-adeel-javaid
4. Randall Patrick Munroe. “Color Survey Results – xkcd”. xkcd Blog, Randall Patrick Munroe, 2010, blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results
5. Thiadmer Riemersma. “Colour Metric”. CompuPhase Website, 2019, compuphase.com/cmetric.htm
6. Charles Poynton. “Frequently Asked Questions about Color”. Charles Poynton’s Website, Charles Poynton, 1999, poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html

The post Getting to the bottom of the RGB pixels. Part 1: Color difference appeared first on Devexperts Blog.

Oracle JDK vs. OpenJDK builds comparison

Devexperts — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 09:31:19 +0000

Intro

If you stay up to date on news from the Java community, you have heard that Oracle has changed their support model for Java.

According to Oracle website, Java SE 8 is going through the End of Public Updates process for legacy releases. This means that Oracle will continue to provide free public updates and auto updates of Java SE 8, until January 2019 for commercial users and at least until December 2020 for personal users.

Changes to the Oracle JDK

In the past, many of us have simply downloaded Oracle JDK and used it in development, testing and production.

Then, in 2018, Oracle changed the license of their JDK. Instead of a single JDK build available both for commercial and free users, they offered two different JDK builds:

Oracle JDK (commercial), which can be used in development and testing for free, but you have pay to use it in production
Oracle Open JDK (open source), which can be used in any environment for free

The up to date prices on the Oracle Java SE Subscription can be found here.

Java SE Platform Products	Monthly Subscription Price	Subscription Metric	Volume
Java SE Desktop Subscription	2,5	Named User Plus	1 - 999
	2,0	Named User Plus	3,000 - 9,999
	1,75	Named User Plus	10,000 - 19,999
	1,5	Named User Plus	20,000 - 49,999
	1,25	Contact for Details	50,000+
Java SE Subscription	250000	Processor	January 1, 1999
	237500	Processor	100 - 249
	225000	Processor	250 - 499
	200000	Processor	500 - 999
	175000	Processor	1,000 - 2,999
	150000	Processor	3,000 - 9,999
	12500	Processor	10,000 - 19,999
	-	Contact for details	20,000+

The changes to the Oracle licenses forced us to look for other JDK vendors. Most of them have different support models (free and paid for), and different attitudes toward providing updates for multiple Java versions.

As Oracle is not the only vendor in this game, it’s time to look beyond their JDK.

Devexperts is happy to share with you the results of our research.

JDK builds

Basically, there is only one set of source code for the JDK. It is hosted in Mercurial at OpenJDK.

Anyone can take the source code, produce a build, and post it. So, Oracle created a certification process that should be used to ensure the build is valid.

This certification is run by the Java Community Process, which provides a Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK or JCK as Java). If an organization produces an OpenJDK build that passes the TCK then that build can be described as “Java SE compatible”.

The most popular and famous builds are distributed by Red Hat, Azul and community-led Adopt OpenJDK.

Here is the full list of JDK builds we’ve researched:

Oracle Commercial JDK
RedHat Open JDK
Azul Zulu
Oracle OpenJDK
AdoptOpenJDK
Amazon Corretto

We’ve assessed all JDK builds using the following criteria:

Long-term support (LTS) options
TCK Compliance
Free / Commercial basis
Support of additional features & tools (Web-start, IntelliJ IDEA, Java FX, etc.)
Supported platforms
Backed by a large corporation

The key differences we will be describe in the following text and the full list of criteria comparisons will be presented in a table at the end of this publication.

Oracle Commercial JDK

For years, many of us have been used Oracle JDK for free and so it has often been our default option. We got used to it.

Staying with the Oracle commercial JDK will be the easy choice for many companies. Oracle Commercial JDK is the best option for those who don’t want to change anything and are ready to pay.

LTS options

Oracle provides its customers with a 3-year support plan for Java 8 (which can be extended to 5 years) and a 5-year support plan for Java 11 (which can be extended to 8 years).

Release	GA Date	Premier Support Until	Extended Support Until	Sustaining Support
Java 8	March 1, 2014	March 1, 2022	March 1, 2025	Indefinite
Java 9 (non-LTS)	September 1, 2017	March 1, 2018	Not Available	Indefinite
Java 10 (18.3^)(non‑LTS)	March 1, 2018	September 1, 2018	Not Available	Indefinite
Java 11 (18.9^ LTS)	September 1, 2018	September 1, 2023	September 1, 2026	Indefinite
Java 12 (19.3^ non‑LTS)	March 1, 2019	September 1, 2019	Not Available	Indefinite

TCK Compliance

All JDK versions are fully TCK compliant.

Free / Commercial basis

If you want to use Oracle JDK you have to pay for a license. The number of licenses depends on the number of individuals registered as a Named User Plus for a Desktop Subscription or Processors.

Named User Plus is defined as an individual authorized by you to use the programs which are installed on a single server or multiple servers regardless of whether the individual is actively using the programs at any given time.

Processor is defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle

Processor Core Factor Table.

According to the new policy you have to make constant calculations of the number of CPUs, users, cores, etc. in production systems which can get pretty complicated..

Support of additional features & tools

Contains JavaFX in JDK 8. Oracle is removing JavaFX from the Java Development Kit (JDK) 11, given an overall desire to pull out noncore modules from the JDK and retire them or stand them up as independent modules
Supports AWT+Swing in JDK 8 and JDK 11
IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)
Supports install4j
Oracle has removed Web Start from Java as a default build

Red Hat JDK

Red Hat OpenJDK 8 (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE).

Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2018 what provided them with a greater level of scale, resources, and capabilities.

LTS options

Major LTS OpenJDK versions (7, 8, and 11) on RHEL are fully supported by Red Hat and Red Hat is committed to providing code-level patches for bug fixes. Major versions are supported for at least 6 years. For instance, OpenJDK 1.8 is supported until June 2023.

	RHEL 5 Support Added	RHEL 6 Support Added	RHEL 7 Support Added	End of Support for OpenJDK version
OpenJDK 6 (1.6)	5.3	6	7	December 1, 2016
OpenJDK 7 (1.7)	5.9	6.3	7	June 1, 2020
OpenJDK 8 (1.8)	N/A	6.6	7.1	June 1, 2023
OpenJDK 11	N/A	N/A	7.6	October 1, 2024

TCK Compliance

RedHat JDK is fully TCK compliant.

Free / Commercial basis

The OpenJDK build is free to use within a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

If you want to use RHEL you should pay for the license:

Self-support subscription – 349 USD / year per server
Standard subscription – 799 USD / year per server
Premium subscription – 1,299 USD / year per server

Support of additional features & tools

IntelliJ IDEA work properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)
Supports install4j
Does not support JavaFX (you will need to install OpenJFX on RH JDK)

Azul Zulu

Azul offers community versions of Zulu, Azul’s certified builds of OpenJDK, for all releases of Java SE. Azul makes no assurances as to the availability or support lifecycle for the community versions of Zulu. The Zulu community builds may be downloaded for enterprise use, and for embedded use.

LTS options

The table below details the class of support lifecycle for each existing and planned JDK release for Azul’s products.

Release	GA Date	End of Oracle Public Updates	Azul Zulu Enterprise	Azul Zulu Embedded
Java 8	March 1, 2014	January 1, 2019	March 1, 2026	March 1, 2026
Java 9 (non-LTS)	September 1, 2017	March 1, 2018	March 1, 2020	Community Only
Java 10 (18.3^)(non‑LTS)	March 1, 2018	September 1, 2018	Community Only	Community Only
Java 11 (18.9^ LTS)	September 1, 2018	March 1, 2019	September 1, 2027	September 1, 2027
Java 12 (19.3^ non‑LTS)	March 1, 2019	September 1, 2019	Community Only	Community Only

TCK Compliance

Azul Zulu is fully tested and certified. Zulu is compliant with Java SE specifications, and has an identical level of performance to the Oracle offering, making it an easy “drop-in” replacement for Oracle HotSpot.

Free / Commercial basis

A Zulu Enterprise license is priced on a subscription basis based upon the number of Supported Systems (desktops and/or virtual or physical servers) running Java applications.

Max # of Supported Systems	Price/Year (Standard Support)	Price/Year (Premium Support)
25	13200	Not available
100	31600	37900
1000	94900	113900
Unlimited	284600	341500

Support of additional features & tools

IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds.
Supports install4j
Fully supported Java for Docker
Does not support Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)
Does not support JavaFX (you need to install OpenJFX on Azul Zulu)

Oracle OpenJDK

Vanilla version JDK which is supported by Oracle engineers and the community. They usually get the newest features first.

LTS options

No LTS, there is a 6-month support cycle for each version, then you have to update JDK if you want to use a supported version of Java. It can cause security risks due to constant updates and unstable GDK.

TCK Compliance

Azul Zulu is fully TCK compliant.

Free / Commercial basis

Oracle OpenJDK is free to use in all environments including production.

Support of additional features & tools

IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) in OpenJDK 11+
Supports install4j
Does not support JavaFX in JDK 8 (JavaFX is still being developed in OpenJFX, which is a project under the OpenJDK community umbrella)

Amazon Corretto

Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK).

Amazon says that Corretto is already Production Ready, it can be downloaded from Amazon website, but for now it is still in Preview mode. General Availability is planned for Q1 2019, and will also include Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms. Corretto 11 builds corresponding to Open JDK 11 on these platforms will follow with ample time for testing before April 2019.

LTS options

Amazon is going distribute security updates to Corretto 8 at no cost until at least June 2023, and to Corretto 11 until at least August 2024. Still, we can’t find any official and published LTS plans.

TCK Compliance

Amazon Corretto is fully TCK compliant. It is certified to meet the Java SE standard and can be used as a drop-in replacement for many Java SE distributions.

Free / Commercial basis

Amazon Corretto is available for download and use at no cost. There are no additional paid features or restrictions.

Support of additional features & tools

Corretto contains JavaFX and can, therefore, be used to easily start a JavaFX based application
IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) because Coretto is based on OpenJDK 11+
No webstart functionality

Adopt OpenJDK

Adopt OpenJDK is a popular OpenJDK build supported by the community and sponsors.

LTS options

Adopt OpenJDK will produce LTS releases for at least four years.

Release	GA Date	End of Availability
Java 8 (LTS)	March 1, 2014	At Least September 2023
Java 9	September 1, 2017	March 1, 2018
Java 10	March 1, 2018	September 1, 2018
Java 11 (LTS)	September 1, 2018	At Least September 2022

TCK Compliance

Note that Adopt OpenJDK is the only JDK build from the list which has not passed TCK.

At this stage, they have not been able to reach an agreement with Oracle to use the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) under the terms of the OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement (OCTLA).

Free / Commercial basis

Adopt OpenJDK is free to use in all environments including production.

Support of additional features & tools

IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
Does not support Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)
Does not support JavaFX
No webstart functionality

Comparison Table

Criteria	Oracle JDK	Red Hat OpenJDK	Azul Zulu	Oracle OpenJDK	Amazon Coretto	AdoptOpenJDK
Long-term support (LTS) options	+ Java 8 till March 2022 (Premier support) and March 2025 (Extended support)	+ LTS of Red Hat OpenJDK 8 till June 2023	+ Java 8 support till March 2026	- No LTS	+ Java 8 support till June 2023	+ Java 8 support till September 2023
	+ Java 11 till September 2023 (Premier support) and September 2026 (Extended support)	+ LTS of Red Hat OpenJDK 11 till October 2024	+ Java 11 support till September 2027	- 6-months support cycle of each version, then you have to update JDK if you want to use a supported version of Java	+ Java 11 support till August 2024	+ Java 11 support till September 2022
TCK Compliance	+ Compliant	+ Compliant	+ Compliant	+ Compliant	+ Compliant	- Non compliant
Free / Commercial basis	Need to purchase licenses.	JDK is free.	Need to purchase subscription packages based on the number of supported systems	JDK is free	JDK is free	JDK is free
	Number of licenses is based on the number of processors, cores and users using Java.	Need to purchase per-server licenses on RHEL.
Support of additional features & tools (Web-start, IntelliJ IDEA, Java FX, etc.)	+ Contains JavaFX in JDK 8 (but Oracle is removing JavaFX from the Java Development Kit (JDK) 11)	+ IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds	+ IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds	IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds	+ Corretto contains JavaFX and can, therefore, be used to easily start a JavaFX based application	+ IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds
	+ IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds	+ Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)	+ Supports install4j	Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) in OpenJDK 11+	+ IntelliJ IDEA works properly with all OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK builds	+ Does not support Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)
	+ Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)	+ Supports install4j	+ Fully supported Java for Docker	Supports install4j	+ Supports Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC) because Coretto is based on OpenJDK 11+	- Does not support JavaFX
	+ Supports install4j	- Does not support JavaFX (you need to install OpenJFX on RH JDK)	- Does not support Java Flight Recorder (JFR) and Java Mission Control (JMC)	Does not support JavaFX in JDK 8 (JavaFX is still being developed in OpenJFX, which is a project under the OpenJDK community umbrella)	- No webstart functionality	- No webstart functionality
	- Oracle has removed Web Start from Java from a default build		- Does not support JavaFX (you need to install OpenJFX on Azul Zulu)
Supported platforms	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64	Supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64
Backed by a large corporation	+ Oracle	+ Red Hat & IBM	+- Azul	- Community	+ Amazon	- Community

Conclusion

Oracle JDK 8 will no longer receive public updates from January 2019. It is not late too change your JDK. If you want to receive updates to Java 8, you may need to pay Oracle or find another JDK build.

LTS options: Oracle has changed their LTS policy for Java 8, 9, 10 and 11
- If you are using Oracle Java 9 or 10 you should change your JDK vendor, because Oracle will no longer support these versions even on a commercial basis
- Other vendors may offer support for Java 9, Java 10 and extended support for Java 8
TCK: It was not a problem when you were using original Oracle JDK. But don’t worry – most of the alternative JDK builds are TCK compliant. While it is still a must-have criterion for choosing a JDK build for production.
Prices: Oracle prices for JDK in production are pretty high
- You can still use Oracle JDK for free in development and testing environments
- Other vendors may offer lower prices and calculation models better suited to your systems
- Other vendors may have free subscriptions with limited functionality
Support of additional features & tools:
- All JDK builds have different supported tools and features. Check if the required feature is included in a default package or can be installed with a plugin
Supported platforms:
- All JDK builds supports Windows x32 & x64 and macOS x64