CX Markets
Cantor Fitzgerald's futures exchange — INNOV8 designed and built the TradeWX trading platform end-to-end.
What we built for CX Markets
- Real-time trading platform
- WebSocket tick-stream frontend
- Order entry and validation
- Market data charting
- UX and product design
- AngularJS SPA architecture
The engagement
CX Markets — the futures-exchange arm of Cantor Fitzgerald — engaged INNOV8 in early 2016 to
design, architect, and develop TradeWX, a
realtime trading platform for weather-derivative futures. Cantor’s CX subsidiary ran niche commodity-futures markets; CX
Markets specifically traded weather-event futures — temperature, snowfall, hurricane occurrence — with
AccuWeather as the underlying data-feed and forecasting partner. The internal codename
was accuweather for exactly that reason.
What we built
A responsive AngularJS single-page trading platform with realtime price-tick streaming, order entry, position management, market-data charting, and account flows. WebSockets carried the market-data tick stream at sub-second cadence so the order book and price ticks stayed live under bursty trading load. INNOV8 owned the product end-to-end — UX and design leadership, product strategy, frontend architecture, and multi-platform engineering all running under one roof while CX’s backend team finished the matching engine and ticker-server APIs in parallel.
The full TradeWX case study covers the architectural decisions in depth — why AngularJS over React in early 2016, the WebSocket reconnection + buffering strategy, the order-entry validation patterns, and the charting layer’s tick-rate-tolerant rendering.
The arc
Five weeks, a full INNOV8 product team, one shipped trading platform. Niche-market financial trading is an unusual SPA target — the data never stops, the order-validation rules can’t tolerate misclicks, and the responsive layout has to work for both desk-bound traders and the tablet-on-couch case. CX Markets was a focused, time-boxed engagement; the architecture had to land right the first time because the market data wasn’t going to stop streaming while we debugged.
Have a project that calls for this kind of work?
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