The following was originally published on Trading Technologies Trade Talk blog. TT Desktop: A Powerful, New Reason to Want the TT Platform By Jason Shaffer Adding the most performant front-end application to the world’s fastest commercially available futures trading platform. Trading Technologies is very proud to announce the release of the new TT Desktop application. This release is a significant step forward for the TT platform, and a significant technical feat in its own right. What it means for our customers is that even the largest, most complex workspaces will thrive on TT Desktop, enabling access to the industry-leading benefits of the TT platform for our most demanding customers. During my time as a trader, one of the most important things for me was performance. To me, “performance” meant both low-latency order execution for my automated strategies as well as a front-end that remained responsive under incredibly heavy load. I actively traded around 75 instruments on any given day and managed hundreds of unique algo instances. As a long-time customer of Trading Technologies, I directly benefited from their decades-long tradition of catering to the most demanding and sophisticated professional traders. Now, as the line of business manager for execution services at TT, I oversee all our trading front-ends and automated trading tools, and it’s my responsibility to ensure we are continuing to meet the high standards our customers expect. This is why I am excited to write about another example of this tradition with the release of TT Desktop, a new way to access the TT platform. TT Desktop is unique in a couple significant ways. First, it does not require a browser. Second, it leverages the latest container technologies to better utilize multi-core processors and graphics cards, allowing you to extend your multi-window workspaces to as many monitors as your computer can support. What this means is that you get the flexibility and execution performance of the TT platform with the highest performing front-end application Trading Technologies has ever released. WHY TT DESKTOP? Until now, the TT platform was only available through a single browser window, which has been sufficient for the majority of users who choose TT. However, some of our users felt too constrained by the single window, were prohibited from trading via a browser by their firm’s IT department, or were skeptical that an application delivered in a browser could meet their needs. With TT Desktop, we can now deliver best-in-class front-end performance for even the largest, most complex workspaces, giving our users an incredibly responsive UI experience, even under significant load, regardless of how many monitors they wish to utilize. Not that you should, but you could actually run a 16-monitor TT Desktop workspace on a single computer. Because each window runs in a separate process, TT Desktop can harness as much computing power as you can give it, which sets it apart from other trading applications, even X_TRADER®. TAKING ACCESSIBILITY TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL Just to be clear, TT Desktop is not a replacement for the browser-based TT. Both ways of accessing the TT platform are very much complementary to one another. In fact, every workspace that is created in TT Desktop is seamlessly available through the browser and vice versa. When you create a multi-monitor workspace in TT Desktop, you can open that same workspace in a browser and have all those windows display as pages (or layers). You no longer need to manage multiple workspaces for the various computers you use to access your trading platform. VISION BECOMES REALITY Back in my trading days when I was using X_TRADER, I had three computers and eight monitors at work, plus two computers with another eight monitors at home. I would push X_TRADER to the limits of what it could do, and that required having large workstations set up both at work and at home. It also meant I couldn’t do my job from anywhere else, because my workspaces took hours to build and configure. When I became one of the first customers to trade on TT, I saw the performance of the automated tools immediately (i.e., Autospreader on TT delivers a 70% latency reduction compared to X_TRADER), but started to quickly appreciate the accessibility and flexibility baked into every aspect of the platform. I was able to manage spreads and algos seamlessly from anywhere (not just at work or home) and loved how I could access all my trading data at any point in the future. The ability to run a full-scale trading operation from a laptop, anywhere in the world, made a compelling difference to the way I worked. Further, the more I learned about the TT architecture, the more I started to appreciate TT’s ability to build new, more complex functionality that would have never been possible on X_TRADER. This is why I was really excited to join the TT product team back in 2015. Since then, the platform has come a long way, and what I learned early on has become clear to many of our customers. Adding an ultra-high-performance front end into the mix is a giant leap forward for the TT platform as a whole and means even traders with the largest and most complex workspaces can start to enjoy all the benefits the TT platform has to offer. The TT Desktop download link is now available (for Windows users) on the Workspaces page at trade.tt. After a one-time installation, you will be delivered the latest version whenever you log in so you’ll never need to worry about upgrades. If you haven’t tried TT yet, go to www.tryttnow.com to sign up for a free trial account.
Fantastic! Maybe im blind, but i cant seem to find ADL on TT Desktop. I find the browser often slows to a crawl with ADL and will freeze and crash due to browser memory if i run it in browser without deploying it (for test purposes).
@Gameboy Thanks for the note. At the moment, ADL is still only available through the browser. We have had several users report a similar experience when working with very large algos. We're going to be releasing an updated version of ADL soon (hopefully Q2) that is optimized to manage such large algos seamlessly. If you're interested in having an early look let me know. And as always, any time you experience an issue please let us know through support so we can help diagnose the problem. There may be a simple solution we can recommend.
i have to say, i like the xtrader desk top version better bc of its professional sheen and the fact the widget/objects are not confined to windows which allows a trader better usage of screen space. however, the differences are marginal. utlimately, i've chosen to move over to TT nex gen bc of the ability to trade custom spreads from my IPAD when I am on the go. really adds to quality of life being able to trade from anywhere
Jason as a follow up to the above comment, I understand why having the windows may be an advantage in certain setups but any chance in the future you will be able to remove the widgets from the windows to allow for ultimate screen flexibility?
@ballsofgold First of all, sweet name. Second, at the moment using the window containers gives us the best performance from the underlying architecture TT Desktop is built on. We have actually had a version of TT Desktop with the same form factor as X_Trader, but it didn't give the performance we need for the more demanding workspaces. User demand will likely be the key determinant as far as if or when we release an 'unconfined' version as you describe. In that spirit, I appreciate your feedback. And I know what you mean, managing spreads and algos from your phone/iPad can change your life if you need to be on 23 hours a day.
fair enough, response is appreciated. I'm slowly getting used to the new platform, i think it is also a matter of breaking habit. there are other advantages that the new platform has over the old xtrader which influenced my decision to switch, but i won't go into them as the forum may think this is an engineered thread. If anyone wants my unbiased feedback thus far, please pm me.....
Jason, also, can you add bracket orders on custom spreads? Some of the other top end auto-spreaders have them...I know there is a way to do it in ADL but this is probably too time consuming
@ballsofgold great question, we're currently doing some work to help Autospreader be smarter about crossing the market (important for synthetic stop orders). In parallel we're testing and planning to add support for all the TT Order Types for Autospreader and Aggregator (smart order routing). I don't have an exact timeline for you, but we are planning to support these.