Trading systems are judged on the days they are under stress, which makes them unusual to procure: the qualities you are buying are mostly invisible in a demonstration. Capacity, resilience, recoverability and the ability to reconstruct exactly what happened are the product. A platform that looks excellent on a calm Tuesday tells you very little.
Resilience requirements are written down, and they are specific
For entities covered by Regulation SCI, 17 CFR 242.1001 requires written policies reasonably designed to ensure systems have adequate capacity, integrity, resiliency, availability and security. The listed components include capacity planning and periodic stress testing, review of systems development and testing methodology, regular vulnerability assessments, and business continuity arrangements with backup capable of next business day resumption of trading and two hour recovery of critical systems. Even if you are not a covered entity, that list is a sound specification.
Supervision means the system has to explain itself afterwards
FINRA Rule 3110 requires member firms to establish and maintain a supervisory system, and in a trading context much of that supervision is performed through the software. Order audit trails, surveillance, exception reporting and records that let someone reconstruct a sequence of events months later are therefore functional requirements rather than compliance paperwork. Ask a bidder how it would reconstruct a disputed order from its logs. The quality of the answer is diagnostic.
Latency is a budget, and it should be written as one
Latency requirements vary enormously, from strategies where milliseconds are immaterial to ones where microseconds decide the business, and the architecture, hosting and cost differ by orders of magnitude between them. Write your actual requirement as a number with a percentile, not as the word fast, and let bidders price against it. Teams that quote low latency architecture without asking what your strategy needs are quoting a stack rather than a solution.
Where custom trading software development is genuinely justified
Custom trading software development pays where your edge lives: strategy logic, risk models, and the specific analytics your traders use. Connectivity, market data handling, order management and compliance surveillance are mostly commodity, mature and safer to buy. The sound pattern is to buy the plumbing and build the part that is actually yours, which also keeps the regulated surface smaller and the vendor accountable for resilience obligations.
Questions people ask about trading software development company
Should we hire a trading platform development company or buy a platform?
Buy the connectivity, market data and order management plumbing, build the strategy, risk and analytics that constitute your edge. Owning commodity infrastructure gives you the resilience obligations without any of the differentiation.
What resilience standard should trading software developers be held to?
17 CFR 242.1001 is a good specification even if Regulation SCI does not apply to you: capacity planning with periodic stress testing, vulnerability assessment, and business continuity with backup capable of next business day resumption and two hour recovery of critical systems.
What do trading platform developers most often get wrong?
Reconstruction. Systems are built to execute and not to explain, and then someone has to account for a disputed sequence months later. Under FINRA Rule 3110 supervision obligations, the audit trail is a functional requirement, so specify it as one.