Brevan Howard – Leveraging Aeron Cluster and Artio for a resilient execution system

Brevan Howard, a European hedge fund known for its global macro trading strategies, faced challenges in managing its growing trade volume. Their initial, centrally-managed platform outgrew the demands of multiple Portfolio Manager teams and various asset classes. Here’s a breakdown of their journey and how Aeron Cluster helped them build a robust, highly scalable trading platform.

The Problem: scaling up whilst remaining resilient

Brevan Howard initially built a central platform to handle order execution, risk management, and order routing for its geographically dispersed Portfolio Management teams. This monolithic system, however, proved difficult to scale as trade volume increased. They encountered bottlenecks in areas like:

• Snapshots and restarts: Managing snapshots and restarts became time-consuming and inefficient.
• Market connectivity: Ensuring reliable market connectivity and handling potential outage scenarios added complexity.

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Using Aeron Cluster in the trading stack: Determinism, Low Latency, and Scalability

Brevan Howard investigated solutions to address these limitations. Aeron’s features emerged as a perfect fit for their requirements:

• High Availability: The replicated state machine architecture ensures the failure of a single node does not lead to a service outage 
• Low latency: Aeron facilitates high-speed communication between system components, critical for fast order execution.
• Resiliency: Aeron’s distributed nature allows the system to handle component failures without impacting operations.

Building a cutting-edge Trade Execution Platform with Aeron Cluster

Brevan Howard leveraged Aeron Cluster to build their execution platform. The platform connects Portfolio Management teams globally to various market participants, including:

• Order Execution Management Systems (OEMS)
• Risk Management Systems (RMS)
• FIX engines for exchange communication
• Internal services for position management and more

Continuous Innovation: Brevan Howard’s custom trading platform enhancements

The hedge fund built additional functionalities on top of Aeron to address specific needs:

• Watermark and Gateway Management: This facilitates efficient message flow and synchronization between clients and the cluster.
• Availability (HA) FIX Engine Solution: They’re developing a hot-to-hot HA solution to ensure uninterrupted FIX communication.

Challenges and how to overcome them

While transitioning to Aeron presented a learning curve, Brevan Howard found Aeron support (provided by Adaptive) invaluable. The Challenges:

• Deterministic mindset: Shifting from an object-oriented approach to a deterministic one required some adjustments in development practices. 
• SBE coding: While powerful, SBE (Simple Binary Encoding) has a learning curve for developers.
• Debugging and troubleshooting: Debugging a distributed system can be complex.

Positive Aeron Support Experience – Help getting started & scaling up

Brevan Howard highlighted the positive aspects of Aeron’s support structure: The Aeron team was readily available through various support channels – including a support portal, email, and video calls – and conducted regular sessions to foster design discussions and ongoing problem-solving assistance.

Key Takeaways implementing a scalable trading platform

• 24/7 Operations: Maintaining a constantly running system requires meticulous planning and testing of upgrades.
• Monitoring Challenges: Shifting from a database-centric approach necessitated development of new tools for system insights.

What’s next?

Brevan Howard’s use case demonstrates how Aeron empowers financial institutions to build scalable and reliable trading platforms. By leveraging Aeron Cluster, the hedge fund was able to create a robust infrastructure to handle their growing trading needs.

Founded in 2002, Brevan Howard is a leading global alternative investment management platform, specialising in global macro and digital assets. It manages assets for institutional investors around the world including sovereign wealth funds, corporate and public pension plans, foundations and endowments.

Brevan Howard has over 1000+ team members, 160+ Portfolio Managers*, and 8 Hubs with offices in London, New York, Geneva, Jersey, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Austin.

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   Subhra Bhattacharya Senior Software Engineer
   Brevan Howard

   LinkedIn profile

   Subhra works as a Senior Software Engineer in the Execution Technology team in Brevan Howard where he builds the central execution platform for the firm. In the past he has worked in other systematic quant funds like Nebula Research and Citadel.