What Is FIX?
FIX stands for Financial Information eXchange. It is the standard language financial institutions use to exchange trade messages: orders, trade confirmations, market data, cancellations, and more.
Think of it as email for trading. Email requires a valid subject, sender, and recipient; FIX requires a valid order or confirmation. Every major bank, broker, and trading venue speaks FIX.
Why it exists
Before FIX, every firm shipped its own trade-message format. Two firms that wanted to connect had to write custom code just to understand each other. As trading grew faster and more global, that approach stopped scaling.
FIX emerged in the early 1990s as a common standard. Thousands of institutions use it today. When your firm connects to a new trading venue, the venue almost certainly expects FIX.
Two sides of every FIX connection
Every FIX connection has two sides.
| Role | Who they are | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Initiator | The side that reaches out | Your system connects to the venue's server. |
| Acceptor | The side that listens | The venue's server waits for incoming connections. |
Most often your firm is the Initiator, dialling out to a venue. Sometimes a counterparty connects to you and your firm is the Acceptor, running the server. Conncentric handles both roles.
What a FIX session is
A FIX session is a live, persistent connection between two parties. Once established, messages flow continuously in both directions. If the session drops, both sides reconnect and reconcile any missed messages.
Three values identify a session, and the venue provides all three when you sign up for connectivity.
- SenderCompID: your firm's identifier on this connection.
- TargetCompID: the venue's identifier.
- FIX Version: the FIX protocol version the session uses (for example, FIX 4.4).
What Conncentric does with FIX
You give Conncentric the connection details and it manages the session. It establishes and maintains the session, reconnects automatically if the connection drops, keeps heartbeats flowing, and routes inbound messages to wherever you send them. It also forwards messages from your systems to the venue.
You configure this once in the Portal. From that point on, it runs on its own.
Do I need to know FIX to use Conncentric?
For most setups, no. You need the connection details from the venue (host, port, SenderCompID, TargetCompID, FIX version), and Conncentric handles the rest.
If you need to filter or transform specific FIX message types or fields, the Pipeline Designer uses plain field names and values, so you do not need to memorize FIX tag numbers. For more complex custom logic, developers can use the Plugin SDK.