About SoftAtBest

Before SoftAtBest, the founder gained deep experience in real-time trading systems and market data infrastructure. During this period, he worked at ILX Systems, contributing to the ILX Workstation, a market data platform later acquired by Thomson Reuters. Building on that expertise, he helped create two day-trading platforms from the ground up — Hammer for Block Trading and LightSpeed for Tradescape — laying the technical and architectural groundwork that would later define SoftAtBest's approach to performance-driven trading solutions.

SoftAtBest was founded in 2003, beginning with a collaboration with VanKar Trading to automate futures strategies running in TradeStation. Over the following decade, the company delivered a range of complex systems for institutional clients. Highlights include developing a sell-side trading platform for Saxis Group, powered by a custom FIX engine that connected to numerous brokers — a network later used by Weeden & Co. and now Jones Trading. SoftAtBest also engineered Armor, a global multi-asset risk management platform featuring advanced Monte Carlo and market shock simulations, marking the company's evolution into a trusted partner for mission-critical financial technology.

During this period, SoftAtBest broadened its scope beyond trading infrastructure into enterprise and media technology. The team developed a website for MGM's CityCenter/Aria Resort, featuring a custom CMS for event management and integration with MGM's booking systems. In parallel, SoftAtBest partnered with Bloomberg's News group, where it played a key role in optimizing the delivery of earnings reports from the Tokyo Stock Exchange — significantly reducing latency and strengthening Bloomberg's competitive edge in real-time financial reporting.

Since 2014, SoftAtBest has focused on the design, development, and ongoing support of Blink, a comprehensive day-trading platform built for Chimera Securities. The system delivers high-performance execution, advanced analytics, and a seamless user experience tailored to the needs of professional traders. In parallel, SoftAtBest continues to maintain and evolve legacy platforms created for institutional clients, ensuring their continued reliability and modernization. This period reflects the company's evolution into a long-term technology partner, trusted for both engineering excellence and sustained client collaboration.

Marking its 20th anniversary, SoftAtBest reflected on two decades of building high-performance trading and data platforms for some of the most sophisticated players in finance and beyond. From early market data systems to large-scale risk management, enterprise CMS, and multi-asset trading environments, the company's journey has been defined by engineering depth, reliability, and long-term client trust. This milestone underscored SoftAtBest's sustained commitment to technical precision, strategic partnerships, and continuous innovation in mission-critical software.

In 2025, SoftAtBest adopted Claude Code — Anthropic's AI coding agent — and pioneered an agentic engineering workflow: AI agents write production-grade systems code under structured expert architectural oversight. Rather than using AI for boilerplate or tooling, the company began directing AI to implement reference trading infrastructure — laying the groundwork for ShiftB.

SoftAtBest built ShiftB, a reference U.S. equity market data implementation produced through agentic engineering — AI agents writing production code under structured expert oversight. It covers direct exchange and regulatory feeds, real-time distribution, interactive monitoring, and cross-platform trading frontends — all built purely from industry specifications. ShiftB validates that agentic engineering can produce trading infrastructure that meets professional standards of correctness, performance, and maintainability — and serves as the blueprint adapted to client engagements.