Connamara Powers the Largest Privately Held American Company’s Energy Trading Desk with a Cutting-Edge FIX Adapter 

The largest privately held company in the United States, boasting a global presence in various industries and staggering revenue in businesses spanning grain trading, energy, livestock, and food production.

The firm’s energy trading desk, a pivotal and growing part of the company’s operations, faced a challenge that demanded an innovative solution. This company sought an automated way to supply trade information to their downstream risk management systems. This would allow the firm to keep track of their open positions and risk.

The client was aware of Connamara’s proven expertise with FIX Protocol and reached out to help them build a fully redundant FIX Adapter to integrate their company’s energy trading desk with The Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).  This adapter would integrate seamlessly, ensuring the reception of crude oil and natural gas trades to feed into their risk management systems.

Connamara’s engineers engaged in a collaborative effort with the company’s in-house IT team. Client specifications were reviewed and clarified through a series of teleconferences. Connamara’s response was a comprehensive requirements specification, including features and a detailed time and cost estimate. The chosen path involved leveraging the open-source FIX library, QuickFIX/J, in Java, aligning perfectly with the firm’s preferred technology stack.

A unique challenge was redundancy – ensuring no trades were missed in case of a failure or communication loss. Connamara addressed this elegantly by leveraging the session heartbeat mechanism natively present in the FIX protocol. This allowed primary and secondary adapters to communicate their status. If the secondary adapter detected a missed heartbeat from the primary, it seamlessly took over, ensuring uninterrupted operations.

The implemented FIX Adapter proved to be a game-changer for this company’s energy trading desk. They could seamlessly expand their activities at the ICE, thanks to Connamara’s innovative solution. The success was not short-lived; the energy trading desk utilized this solution from 2008 to 2022, showcasing the longevity and reliability of Connamara’s work.

This case study showcases Connamara’s ability to build solutions in any required language, our expertise in QuickFIX and the FIX Protocol, and our commitment to long-term client support and maintenance.