Large volume trading in 2024: Tips for the best performance

Author: Ivan Egorov

Any trading process requires due diligence and focus. Everything happens within milliseconds, so the pressure is high to coordinate and ensure the best results. And when it comes to large-volume trading, there’s even more at stake, and a mistake can throw things off.

At TFB, we work with brokerages, hedge funds, and prop trading firms of all sizes, and we’ve witnessed many of our clients grow over time and have seen how large volumes have transformed their operations. Sometimes, it’s a rocky process, especially if you don’t have someone to guide you.

That’s why today, we are sharing some of the tips on large-volume trading that have greatly helped our clients and allowed them to grow exponentially without falling for common mistakes.

Technical tips

Here are some of our technical tips for installation and configuration that make a real difference.

• Look at how effective your liquidity bridge is as this makes a difference in how much workload it can handle without crashing or freezing. Trade Processor, for example, consists of components spread across several instances. This means that the bridge is scalable and can seamlessly grow with you.
• Change up the configuration. There may be little tweaks in the settings that you can adjust that seem insignificant but will greatly impact how the bridge performs with large volumes. With Trade Processor, you can do it yourself, but unless you’re experienced with the solution, we recommend consulting our tech team to ensure top performance.

Aggregation and order execution tips

As your business and volumes grow, it’s helpful to refresh your approach to aggregation.

• Don’t stick to one Liquidity Provider (LP). Connect to multiple reliable LPs and group the best ones into an aggregation pool. You can get better pricing with large volumes if you distribute the volumes between several LPs.
• Switch up your aggregation modes. Most modern liquidity gateways will offer multiple aggregation modes. Trade Processor has six modes that you can choose from, some of them unique to TFB. You can get the best execution and manage your risks at the same time.
• Use continuous execution for large orders. What it does is split large orders into smaller pieces and executes them over time. This approach takes a bit longer, but instead of momentarily wiping out the entire liquidity and getting worse pricing, you get the best possible pricing acquired over a period of time.
• To make your days less stressful and busy, use volume consolidation to automatically consolidate open positions between several LPs at the end of the day. You won’t have to do it manually, and you won’t risk making a mistake.

Bonus tips for availability

Let’s talk about maintaining service availability, a.k.a. keeping your infrastructure up and running no matter what. We already touched on that when talking about the architecture of the solution and how it influences performance, but there’s more that you can do to ensure your large-volume trading runs smoothly.

• Backup and failover. Nobody is immune from a disaster; if something happens, a good backup strategy will save you from embarrassment and financial losses. Within the Trade Processor, you can set up a backup LP to guarantee seamless execution even if your primary LP goes down. However, what if your whole bridge is down? We recommend having a failover bridge to switch the execution and minimise downtime. Trust us, you don’t want to manage complaints from clients who couldn’t trade for a few hours.
• 24/7 monitoring and alerts to stay aware of how your whole system is functioning. Configure alerts to notify you about any abnormality and run regular reports for internal analysis to spot trends and potential issues.

That’s it for today. We hope these tips will enrich your large-volume trading process and help you grow faster and easier. If you have questions about today’s article, large volume trading overall, demos, or anything else, please feel free to email us at sales@t4b.com, and we’ll be happy to consult and guide you.