Re: FIX for options
Mahesh Kumaraguru <>
22 May 2008 10:51PM ET
My answers are below:-
> Are FIX specs for options very different from FIX specs for equities?
Yes, if you are looking at the application messages and
No if you are looking at the Session messages.
>I have worked on FIX equitiy and I just need to get a sense of the effort required for handling FIX messages for options.
I would not venture to give you a person-year effort number :-( If you have the session layer (Logon, Heartbeat, TestRequest, Logout, Resend Request, Sequence reset, Gap Fill, SLR, etc...) working and tested for a particular version of FIX for an asset class, then implementing a different asset class on this FIX engine is much easier than implementing a Session message handler from scratch. Based on my understanding of FIX, I see the architecture of most FIX applications logically as two tier
Tier 1 - FIX Engine - transports business data without understanding the meaning of data.
Tier 2 - Trading Application - produces and consumes business data without understanding how the data is moved.
Refer some of my posts below for my descriptions of FIX engines
http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/94232f30
http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/6759c8ec
http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/989329eb
>Are the header/footer and admin messages (heartbeat, login, logoff, sequence reset etc) for the two are same? and they only differ in application messages??
Yes, All "production" FIX Messages are 8=FIX.X.Y^9=999^35=X^Repeating Tag=Value^10=007^.
and Session is same whatever the application messages.
http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/c87136ed
You could have a FIX Session connected and heartbeating for any length of time without exchanging any application messages, but even one error in session message may crash the FIX session.
Regards,
K. Mahesh
