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freon - The Open Source Market Integrator

Welcome to this wiki for freon. Freon is an open source market integrator. We hope this will be a useful project in the world of financial trading.

What Is a Market Integrator

Many financial instruments are traded on electronic marketplaces or exchanges. Often for any given type of instrument, there are multiple such markets, all with different connectivity requirements and individual APIs ( Application Programming Interfaces ).

For example, the US Treasury market can be traded on systems such as Brokertec, eSpeed, TradeWeb. For institutions and individuals using these markets, it is difficult or impossible to monitor the best price and to ensure that best execution is achieved when using the trading applications provided by the markets. A combined multiple market view or "virtual" market view is needed. The aim of freon is to provide such a view and further to provide an integrated trading application to manage orders, quotes and fills.

For the IT departments in such organizations, writing such a system and keeping on top of all the changes in all the different APIs from the various markets is very difficult. Many commercial firms provide various integration platforms, but these suffer from the same problems as any proprietary software. The are also expensive.

For the end user of these commercial offerings, not only are they expensive to purchase, but you end up locked into an endless cycle of releases where your release schedule depends upon your integration system vendor and is out of your control.

Freon aims to break this cycle by providing an open integrator platform, and most importantly an open gateway API. In this way markets themselves can provide the gateways to end users, ensuring when a market upgrades it's API, it and it's users are not dependant on teh development resources of any third parties.

Why The Name Freon?

Freon is a noble gas. It is inert and does not react or change in any way. The freon integrator is designed to be an inert component between the market and the trading institution.