Case Study: Chimera Securities --- Building a Custom Day Trading Platform
Client Overview
Chimera Securities, a leading proprietary trading firm, specializes in rapid-order-entry and intraday strategies across U.S. equity markets. With a large base of professional traders, Chimera required a trading solution that could provide a competitive technological edge while maintaining full control over performance, compliance, and customization.
Challenge
Before engaging SoftAtBest, Chimera relied on several third-party trading platforms such as Takion, Lightspeed, and Sterling. While these systems served daily operations, they limited Chimera's ability to differentiate its trading environment, respond quickly to traders' requests, and develop proprietary features.
To retain top talent and accelerate innovation, Chimera decided to develop a fully custom trading platform --- one that could deliver uncompromising performance, full feature control, and a tailored user experience.
Solution
Phase 1 --- Scout: The Market Data Platform
The engagement began with Scout, a market data subsystem designed to deliver real-time, lag-free market data to traders, including those operating remotely over the internet. Scout addressed latency spikes seen in legacy systems and introduced a robust foundation for real-time indicator calculations, alerting, and market-wide stock rankings.
(Scout is covered in a separate case study.)
Phase 2 --- Blink: The Trading Platform
Upon the successful deployment of Scout, the second phase --- Blink --- focused on delivering a complete direct market access (DMA) trading platform.
Blink was engineered to offer:
- Full market connectivity: Direct access to all U.S. exchanges with comprehensive order type support.
- Extreme customization: Highly flexible screen layouts, multi-monitor support, custom colors, fonts, and widget arrangements to match each trader's workflow.
- Keyboard-driven speed: Configurable key bindings and order templates enabling rapid order entry and position management.
- Risk and compliance enforcement: Real-time monitoring and enforcement of trading limits and regulatory policies.
- Integration ecosystem: Seamless connections with real-time news, research providers, and locate services.
To ensure a smooth transition, Blink was designed to emulate workflows familiar to traders coming from other platforms, minimizing the learning curve.
Technical Approach
SoftAtBest selected C++ for all latency-critical backend components, ensuring microsecond-level performance for order routing and data processing. C# was used for front-end development and non-critical backend tasks, optimizing for speed of iteration and user interface flexibility.
A locally run C++ API layer unified the front-end and algorithmic trading components, allowing both manual and automated traders to share identical capabilities and market access.
The system was built to be profilable, tunable, and verifiable, with a comprehensive audit trail for post-trade analysis. As the platform evolved, robust engineering practices --- including unit and functional testing, CI/CD pipelines, code reviews, and multi-environment deployment (test, staging, production) --- ensured continuous stability.
A dedicated modernization team worked in parallel to integrate newer compilers and tools without disrupting production, preserving long-term maintainability.
Collaboration
The project's success was driven by tight daily collaboration between SoftAtBest's engineering team and Chimera's technical and management staff. This partnership ensured rapid feedback cycles, precise requirement validation, and continuous alignment with traders' evolving needs.
Results
The resulting platform, Blink, was enthusiastically adopted by Chimera's traders. Transition from legacy systems was seamless, and traders benefited from the platform's performance, flexibility, and responsiveness.
The project demonstrated that with a solid technical foundation, rigorous engineering processes, and strong client collaboration, a complex trading ecosystem can be successfully built from the ground up.
Key Takeaway
The Chimera Securities project reaffirmed that the success of large-scale financial software initiatives depends equally on deep technical expertise and disciplined project management. Through this partnership, SoftAtBest delivered a world-class, proprietary trading platform that empowers Chimera to innovate independently and trade with unmatched precision.