Trader Desktop

This is an exercise in learning key web technologies using a simple trading scenario.

Domain Model

The business domain consists of Instruments that can be traded in the financial market. We will limit the scope to equities (also knows as stocks).

Traders (who are system Users) can place Orders for different instruments in the stock market. Orders placed by the traders are sent to a server that manages the actual placement in the market. When the server receives a large order, it may break the order in to small chunks called Placements and push them to the market at different times. This makes sure that large orders do not swing the market in unintended ways. Also a large order may not get filled in one shot, it may require several Executions to fill - depending on the supply and demand of the stock.

The server keeps the trader informed about the progress of their orders. In fact, it keeps all traders informed about all orders, whether placed by them or other traders.

RESTful API

For the purpose of this exercise the server has been completely coded - you don't have to worry about it. You will only be coding the front-end.

The server exposes three RESTful resources: Users, Instruments and Orders. These are described below.

Users

Get Users

Returns all Trader Desktop users. Assume all these users are traders.

Request

GET http://localhost:8080/users HTTP/1.1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

[
  {
    "id": "AM",
    "name": "Amadeus Mozart"
  },
  {
    "id": "AR",
    "name": "A. R. Rahman"
  },
  ...
]

Instruments

Get Instruments

Returns all instruments traded at the exchange.

Request

GET http://localhost:8080/instruments HTTP/1.1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

[
  {
    "symbol": "AAPL",
    "name": "Apple Inc.",
    "lastTrade": 98.7
  },
  {
    "symbol": "ADBE",
    "name": "Adobe Systems Inc.",
    "lastTrade": 13.13
  },
  ...
]

Orders

An order object has the following properties:

id: int
creationTime: date,
side: 'Buy' | 'Sell'
symbol: String
quantity: int
quantityPlaced: int
quantityExecuted: int
limitPrice: float
priority: int  [1 (Low) - 100 (High)]
status: 'New' | 'Placed' | 'Executed'
traderId: String

Get Orders

Returns all orders saved on the server.

Request

GET http://localhost:8080/orders HTTP/1.1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

[
  {
    "id": 78,
    "creationTime": "2013-04-16T22:41:51.380Z",
    "side": "Buy",
    "symbol": "DIS",
    "quantity": 983444,
    "quantityPlaced": 983444,
    "quantityExecuted": 983444,
    "limitPrice": 31.46,
    "priority": 50,
    "status": "Executed",
    "traderId": "AM"
  },
  ...
]

Create Order

Creates an order on the server.

Request

POST http://localhost:8080/orders HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "side": "Buy",
    "symbol": "AAPL",
    "quantity": 10000,
    "limitPrice": 426.24,
    "traderId": "AM"
}

Response

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "id": 10,
  "creationTime": "2013-04-17T00:01:18.000Z",
  "side": "Buy",
  "symbol": "AAPL",
  "quantity": 10000,
  "quantityPlaced": 0,
  "quantityExecuted": 0,
  "limitPrice": 426.24,
  "priority": 50,
  "status": "New",
  "traderId": "AM"
}

Delete All Orders

Deletes all orders on the server.

Request

DELETE http://localhost:8080/orders HTTP/1.1

Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server Events

In addition to the RESTful resources described above, the server also pushes events to the client using WebSockets. This makes sure that all clients are aware of what is going on. For example, an order placed by trader A is visible to all other traders. Server events are described below.

orderCreatedEvent

The payload contains the order that was created.

placementCreatedEvent

The payload contains the placement that was created:

orderId: int
quantityPlaced: int
status: 'New' | 'Placed' | 'Executed'

executionCreatedEvent

The payload contains the execution that was created:

orderId: int
quantityExecuted: int
executionPrice: float
status: 'New' | 'Placed' | 'Executed'

allOrdersDeletedEvent

This event is sent when all orders on the server are deleted.

Build Instructions

As mentioned earlier, the server is fully coded. Use the instrunctions below to build and run it.

Install Build Tools

• Install Node.js.

• Install Grunt.

    $ npm install -g grunt-cli
  

Build the Server

• Clone the Trader Desktop repository on your machine.

• Open a command shell and change the directory to the local instance of the repository.

• Install the required NPM packages:

    $ npm install
  

• Start the server using the following command:

    $ npm start
  

• Make sure the server is running by pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080. You should see the server home page with the message "This is the Trader Desktop server".