Manual Trading Platform Expansion

2 posts · Nov 2022 – Jun 2025

What this trail covers

HRT has expanded its manual trading capabilities with ToucanServer, a gRPC and protobuf-based server implemented in C++. ToucanServer allows for more versatile human-driven trading by exposing order entry, state management, and position-tracking features. It utilizes a multithreaded architecture with thread-safe queues and client-specific mutexes to handle concurrent client requests and order processing. This enables the development of flexible front-end interfaces for manual trading operations. The Parrot system has been enhanced to use gRPC streaming for improved performance, reducing per-request overhead and enabling asynchronous order submission via Trio.

All Hudson River Trading trails

Jun 2025Intern Spotlight: Software Engineering Summer ProjectsThe Parrot system, built on ToucanServer, has been enhanced to utilize gRPC streaming. This change reduces the overhead of individual HTTP calls per order by sending headers only once over a long-lived request. The client-side implementation was refactored to use asynchronous operations with Trio to handle concurrency and out-of-order responses, while maintaining a similar API. This improves the speed of sending orders in a loop and allows for concurrent order submission.
Nov 2022Intern Spotlight: 2022 Software Engineering ProjectsThis post details the development of Labshell, an interactive shell designed to complement HRT's Labtest framework. Labshell addresses Labtest's lack of interactivity by providing a shell that allows for real-time manipulation of deployed trading environments, including swapping binaries and changing configurations on the fly. The architecture employs an immutable data flow with a central render loop to effectively handle both minor and major environment changes. This enables more dynamic testing and management of complex trading setups.
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