Question

Can somebody suggest a place (websites) where to find 'real' FIX messages. By real I mean not examples but 'real' so that if I put them into an engine it won't complain that tag 10 is incorrect or that I am missing some mandatory tags.

I am specifically after execution reports.

Ideally I'd love to find a large sequence of fix messages representing few days of activities. I appreciate this can be sensitive data but surely tag 1,tag 207,tag 55 can all be obfuscated.

Many Thanks

Was it helpful?

Solution

You can get some sample data from validfix.

fix-analyzer.html has many examples of different fix messages

fix-log-analyzer.html has just one big example of a real log from some sort of fix engine.

(fixed broken link)

OTHER TIPS

Try FIX parser and click on the "sample data" button. It will generate a set of valid fix messages (including execution reports). Obviously you can also use it as a FIX parser to help you make sense of your data. Note that this text is separated by the actual FIX delimiter (SOH character). This means that visually all the text will look like a jumble of characters.

The problem with FIX is it'a a real catch-all protocol. It allows a lot of flexibility.

If you look, for example, at the spec for the Execution Report message in FIX 4.4 (BTW: always better to specify a version number with FIX), you'll notice that most of the tags you mentioned are not required by the protocol. Of the three you mentioned, only tag 55 is required on that message type. That means that whether tag 1 or 207 are there or not is up to the implementation in question.

So, unfortunately, there are no canonical samples. You should ask for sample messages from the party with whom you're trying to communicate.

There are some examples of the TradeCaptureReport message you're talking about on my Online FIX Decoder page (shameless plug) which will not only show you the contents of the encoded message, but will decode it neatly into a table for you, assigning labels to the otherwise cryptic integers.

These particular examples were made publicly available by the LSE.

If you're doing trade reporting, the exact format you have to send will depend upon the vendor you're using. It's best to contact them directly and ask for samples as what is valid for one vendor is likely different from another.

There are some on the FIX protocol website if you have access (I don't know if they are available without logging on) or you can generate them yourself using the examples provided by quickfix.

I had the same need and ended up having to build something to automatically reformat FIX messages from one session to another. It turned out to be quite useful in our own testing, so I ended up hosting a server for it. Shameless plug here, but FIXSIM.com might be of use.

Go to the CME-DataMine website where you can find Market Depth FIX files with all market data messages required to recreate the order book. ( CME DataMine )

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