The high-performance worlds of quant trading and competitive auto racing have more in common than you might think. Speed is of the essence on the leading edge of financial services. The stakes are high, and there’s no margin for error. And, the elements that comprise the technical stacks for both worlds must be cutting-edge and extremely well-integrated so that optimal outcomes can be achieved with consistent certainty.
What Do Quant Trading and Auto Racing Have in Common?
The critical components of a high-performance racing team map well to the components of the technology infrastructure needed to build and run a winning operation in quant trading. Just as with model generation, strategy testing, order execution, and risk assessment, it’s essential that all of the analogous pieces of a race car—fuel, analytics, technologies, and the engine—be delivered quickly in a highly integrated form.
Auto racing and quant trading are both team sports. And as with most sports, success requires a mix of technical expertise, analytical skills, and creativity. Good things happen when the very best of technology is delivered in sync to a talented and coordinated team for execution. The margin between winning and coming in second place can be razor thin, the push to compete is relentless, the risks are very high, and performance must be of the highest caliber and consistent.
Breaking Down the System Components
In both auto racing and quant trading, all of the elements must be in optimal alignment and delivered with the greatest speed and precision.
These include:
- Advanced composites: In racing, not just any material will do. Each must be of the highest grade and delivered efficiently and with consistency and precision. Data is the advanced composite that powers the world of quant trading and it too must be of the highest grade, particularly when it comes to running the very latest in AI and analytics applications. As with advanced composites, no matter the type of data, it must be able to be manipulated and combined in novel ways.
- Onboard and trackside analytics: Auto races are not won by speed alone; strategy and tactics that are developed and revised in real time during the race to account for track conditions, weather, and a host of other factors are often the key to success. The same is true in quant trading applications. The ability to quickly adjust to changes in market conditions and generate new strategies can reap huge rewards. Whether it’s iterating through models, retraining strategies, or applying new data and data mart sources, optimizing trading technologies to handle lightning quick decision-making is essential.
- Orchestration and delivery: Formula 1 is a well-choreographed sport. All of the components of the car—steering, transmission, brakes, suspension, aerodynamics—are interdependent, making seamless integration an absolute necessity. In addition, these elements may need to be adjusted or even replaced during the course of a race, making coordination that much more important. In trading, an adaptable and multi-dimensional technology stack that enables a CI/CD approach also leads to enhanced results. Having access to the very best technology in each instance can make all the difference in results.
- A platform for winning: Ultimately in a race, success or failure on the track rests on three components: the driver, the car, and the team. While all engines must conform to the same broad specifications, the skill and expertise of a racing team can provide the small improvements that lead to consistent, winning performance. The situation is much the same in quant trading: On the surface, there may be little distinction between the best components but how they’re combined and managed can make all the difference. In short, it pays to have coordinated components that are optimally configured.
In It to Win It in Quant Trading with Pure Storage
When it comes to both car racing and high-performance data in quant trading, Pure Storage is uniquely qualified and experienced. Pure Storage provides tightly integrated technology solutions that drive insight through advanced analytics. In financial markets, the story is the same.
In the world of quant trading, Pure Storage solutions deliver:
- Fuel: Profitable strategies require massive volumes and varieties of data, including unstructured, alternative, and metadata. Single-tier, all-flash storage is the optimal way to quickly and efficiently ingest, manage, and utilize all that data.
- Analytics: Work faster, work smarter. Generating insights from data requires both the high throughput and low latency critical to AI/ML operations while an agile stack is needed to iterate quickly, fail fast, and capture fleeting alpha.
- Orchestration and delivery: Free your data scientists to do data science. Manage mission-critical applications with Evergreen® flexible capacity and no planned downtime, even when swapping out components. Leverage the industry-leading Kubernetes platform to simplify building, automating, and securing cloud native applications.
- Hardware: Complexity and tech debt slow innovation. Distributed, scale-out data storage provides the flexibility and performance needed to exploit alpha opportunities with intelligent architecture, multi-protocol capabilities, and dynamic scalability to simplify and consolidate data at exabyte scale. And Pure’s new FlashBlade//E™ provides the benefits of all-flash with better economics than disk.
When microseconds matter, you need the very best technology to achieve optimum performance. Whether it’s taking the checkered flag at the track or capturing alpha in financial markets, Pure Storage has the winning formula.
Read our new quantitative trading white paper to learn how Pure’s all-flash solutions deliver unmatched speed, scalability, and simplicity. And meet with an expert to find out how Pure Storage® enterprise-class data solutions accelerate financial services.
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