Gateways, a book builder, strategies, and an OMS are the critical components of any trading system. They gather the essential functions you need to start trading. We measure the performance of a trading system in terms of speed by adding the processing time of all the critical components. We start a timer when a price update gets into the entrance of the trading system and we stop the timer when the order triggered by this price update goes out from the system. This time is called the tick-to-trade or tick-to-order.

In the most recent systems, this time is in the order of microseconds (around 10 microseconds). When optimized with special hardware and software programming, this time can even be reduced to nanoseconds (around 300 nanoseconds). Because we choose to use Python to implement our trading system, the tick-to-trade of this Python system will be in the order of milliseconds.