About

STAC®, the Securities Technology Analysis Center LLC, is a vendor-neutral specialist in high-performance capital markets technology. Our mission is to make performance transparent™. This means helping end-user firms understand the performance of their existing systems and of new technologies they may wish to adopt. It also means helping vendors generate leads and accelerate sales cycles by getting credible performance metrics in front of interested buyers.

Securities firms today face significant challenges in measuring the performance of their trading systems. Meanwhile, market pressures continually increase performance expectations. And technology vendors continue to supply new ways to meet those expectations. Vendors are innovating at every layer of the technology stack—from applications and middleware to operating environments, processors, co-processors, servers, networks, and storage.

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STAC improves transparency by several means:

STAC Benchmark Council™ - STAC facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council, a group of trading firms and vendors specifying standard methods for measuring the performance of trading systems. The resulting STAC Benchmarks are the only technology benchmark specs tailored for today's trading business needs.

STAC Research™ - STAC engages with trading firms and vendors to measure the capabilities of new offerings, using industry standard STAC Test Harnesses™ (see below) or proprietary methodologies in cases where STAC Benchmark specifications are still in development. Whether public or private, STAC Reports™ serve as objective evidence of a system’s performance.  Public STAC Reports are made available on this web site to a rapidly growing subscriber base that has self-selected for its interest in the performance of real-time information and transactions.

STAC Test Harnesses™ - STAC provides tools that enable end-user firms and vendors to run STAC Benchmarks in the privacy of their own labs. End-user firms can "mark their system to market" by making apples-to-apples comparisons with publshed STAC Reports. Vendors can use internally-generated STAC Benchmarks to guide development, and they can call in STAC when they wish to publish an audited STAC Report. STAC Test Harnesses measure things such as latency, throughput, and integrity for discrete steps of the trading process. STAC also offers tools not associated with official STAC Benchmarks.

STAC is a tbdCorp company.

tbdCorp and the tbdCorp logo are trademarks of Technology Business Development Corporation.