Software Architecture Coupling Metric for Assessing Operational Responsiveness of Trading Systems

The empirical observation that motivates our research relies on the difficulty to assess the performance of a trading architecture beyond a few synthetic indicators like response time, system latency, availability or volume capacity. Trading systems involve complex software architectures of distributed resources. However, in the context of a large brokerage firm, which offers a global coverage from both, market and client perspectives, the term distributed gains a critical significance indeed. Offering a low latency ordering system by nowadays standards is relatively easily achievable, but integrating it in a flexible manner within the broader information system architecture of a broker/dealer requires operational aspects to be factored in. We propose a metric for measuring the coupling level within software architecture, and employ it to identify architectural designs that can offer a higher level of operational responsiveness, which ultimately would raise the overall real-world performance of a trading system.