FPGA Based Stock Market Data Feed Handler

Project Title

Project Area of Specialization

Electrical/Electronic Engineering

Project Summary

Stock Market is one of the most important pivots of countries economy. For the growth of industry and commerce stock market plays important role which in turn effects economy. It also plays the most important role of supporting the growth of the industry and commerce in the country. In stock market, every trader wants to out perform other trader and make decision as quickly as they can. The information of each share in stock market depends on the international news that is carried by network cables and received by trading instruments .They need a system which process the incoming data more quickly as compared to others and help them (The Investors) to make decisions according to the current situation of financial market. Maybe, stock market of Pakistan is yet slow, but with growing trend of stock market investors stock market of Pakistan will go towards high frequency trading. So it is necessory to have a device that can help investors make decisions quickly. Conventionally the instruments used for receiving and processing stock market data are personal computers. To speed up the process Programmers do system programming to process the data directly on processors. But on general purpose computers, microprocessor performs many tasks at a time. Mostly it is not dealing with single thread only because there are necessary tasks for microprocessor to take care of. As General Purpose Computer performs many tasks at a time due to which the speed becomes slow. In Stock Market, latency of milliseconds can change the game. They need processors that are fast ,reliable with high speed and low latency. So rather than using general purpose processors a dedicated environment is more preferable because FPGA have fewer abstractions and can be faster, more flexible with great execution speed, power efficient and less complexity as compared to CPU. So, it can be a great choice for stock market. In our project we will be programming FPGA and specifically design it for the algorithms of stock market so it will only process the data of our need and requirement. It will get data through Ethernet cable and process it, based on the protocol it carries. Our basic aim is to do parallel processing of the data so it will give accurate information of financial market as quick as possible in minimum time. On this basis, it will help the investors to take good and precise decisions.

Project Objectives

As Pakistan is progressing and stock market is becoming essential part of it because of increasing number of bussinesses and use of trading robots it is matter of time that stock market of Pakistan will be very fast and micro seconds would matter. We desire to make a device that would accurately decode the encoded messages and allow the trader to make decision as quickly as possible to get profit.

Project Implementation Method

To implement a client FPGA and a host computer was developed. Both parts of FYP are explained below:

1) FPGA implementation: Because of avaialability of data and technical details high frequency client for NASDAQ stock market was implemented. NASDAQ stock market uses MoldUDP64 protocol, which is a layer built over User Datagram Protocol. Seperate modules for recieving UDP data and decoding the data, considering the recieved packet was coded as MoldUDP64, were coded in FPGA. This data is than sent to computer through usb port to display it.

2) Host Computer: Because of unavailbility of testing enviroment a host computer will be developed. The host computer is a server written C++ able to send and recieve UDP packet.

Benefits of the Project

Stock Market investment is turning to be a game changer for the large companies. Large compaies like Facebook are also launching online currency. To trade in companies stocks and participate in money trading having good knowledge of the whole world buying/selling of a particular stock is not enough. Getting this information quickly is also very essential part of modern trading. Using our device will highly effect the companies performance who have invested there money.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Our final deliverables only include an FPGA programmed using Veriloog. And to show working of our device C++ program running in a Linux operating system will be used.