Connecting Traders and Signal Providers with Realtime Data Streaming

SignalPush is a realtime signal dashboard and automated binary option trade copier that uses realtime data streaming to send information to traders.

Time is money, and nowhere is this aphorism more appropriate than in the world of financial trading, where the state of the markets change thousands of times per second.

For SignalPush, providing information in realtime is crucial to investors. An Austin, Texas, based startup, SignalPush built a desktop dashboard that aggregates disparate information critical for financial trading. All of the information that a trader uses during the course of their trading day – signals, trades, news, breakout and volatility alerts and more – all flow into the SignalPush desktop dashboard.

Especially helpful for internationally-based novice traders is the ability to automatically copy a trade from a professional signal provider. This allows the novice to follow alongside the professional while also saving time by automatically forwarding the signal to the binary option platform based on the users configured risk parameters. If the copy of the trade is not timely, or the market signal and information lags realtime, the investor could make bad decisions based on old market data.

The Need for Realtime Speed

In developing their application, SignalPush recognized the need to ensure extremely rapid delivery of information by data streaming, as well as the need to guarantee that information is received by the dashboard exactly once, as a duplicate message could result in unintended duplicate copies of trade signals. This required a realtime messaging infrastructure.

Having had previous experience with the burden of maintaining a complex realtime infrastructure, and facing the classical dilemma of build vs. buy, SignalPush turned to PubNub. Information providers send signals, trades, and other information directly to the SignalPush data center, where it is validated and then distributed to subscribers using the PubNub Data Stream Network.

To compensate for transient network issues, SignalPush uses a feature of PubNub Data Streams to send data to multiple geographically dispersed PubNub data centers. Each PubNub data center then sends a copy of the data to the appropriate information subscribers.

Using the PubNub Adobe AIR SDK, the SignalPush dashboard application receives the data from the information provider. As the data is coming from multple PubNub data centers, the application will receive multiple copies of each piece of information. As soon as the first data copy is received, the information is used, and the other copies are automatically discarded. In this manner, the SignalPush dashboard reliably receives information as quickly as possible, regardless of location or transient network speed and connectivity issues.

In addition to the dashboard, SignalPush also employs a browser plugin. This plugin is able to detect trade signals, and sends the trade information to the SignalPush data center using the PubNub Data Stream Network. This trade information is then rebroadcast to subscribers, again using multiple separate PubNub data centers.

Picking PubNub

As part of their development process, SignalPush evaluated a number of different solutions for providing rapid information dissemination. The tested speed and reliability of the PubNub Data Stream Network was a critical factor in their decision process. Also critical were both development and operational support.

“PubNub saves us the resources, costs and headache of having to build and maintain the realtime infrastructure ourselves. The PubNub team is always quick to respond and makes themselves available to us when we need them. PubNub makes sure all of our needs are met. It’s been a great experience,” said Ryan Masten, Founder and CEO of SignalPush.