What's FIX protocol

Question

Any idea of FIX protocol ?

Thanks

Answer 1

FIX protocol is a protocol for application communication between financial institutions. Mainly stock exchanges, brokers, market-makers, dealers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIX_protocol

Took 2 seconds to find using Wikipedia/Google.

You have a Java tag on this question so I think you might be looking for a FIX communication library in Java...http://www.quickfixj.org/

Answer 2

The FIX protocol (Financial Information eXchange) is a series of messages for the electronic exchange of financial messages. Most large banks and investment banks use it to accept things like orders from external entities such as hedgefunds etc.

A FIX message is basically a tag/format string. Each tag is a number which cross-references to an entity. For example:

8=FIX.4.1

8 means FIX version.

There is an XML variation of the messages, called FixML, but last time I looked it wasn't extensively used.