Her team is once again in the thick of test driving a pilot application, as they assist in cultivating the speed, flexibility and efficiency of the cloud architecture to create the ability to query and analyze very large data sets – typically involving activity in heavily traded securities with literally millions of transaction records returning in a single query. In the past, a data analysis of this magnitude required intervention from the technology team, but that’s another story…

Bohlin and a team of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testers were heavily involved in developing FastOLA through the Agile methodology. Business users participated in biweekly sprints, refining the tool to meet the market regulation analysts’ needs. “We took our years of experience and lessons learned using the previous query tool and applied them to the new technology and cloud architecture to allow the speed to happen and work in today’s environment,” Bohlin said.

Analysts time is no longer spent waiting for queries and wading through enormous excel spreadsheets. “Analysts are able to quickly obtain a full picture of what happens to an order over time, helping to inform decision making as to whether a rule violation has occurred,” Bohlin said.

Another game changer is the lifecycle summary FastOLA provides at the beginning of every order. “Many orders we analyze through the course of our work are large orders that get split into many different child orders that get routed throughout the marketplace. There are literally thousands of events in a single lifecycle,” Bohlin said. “Instead of a spreadsheet with thousands of rows, which our analysts had to scroll down through, they receive a single screen summary of the executions.”

Shelly Bohlin, FINRA VP Quality of Markets/Market Regulation, says the speed of our custom analytics tool, FastOLA, is a game changer for her Market Reg analysts who use the system daily and had been waiting hours at times to receive a return on a complex order lifecycle query using FINRA’s previous query tool. “There was a general frustration level, if you really wanted to see what happened, and then having to wait. You had to turn your attention away and wait for the query to come back,” Bohlin said of the system FastOLA replaced. “Now it almost immediately comes back. You stay focused."

We sat down with Senior Director Matt Cardillo to discuss FastOLA, a custom application released in 2014 that leverages both cloud and open source technology. FastOLA, an analytics tool, compiles large amounts of market trade data from places like NASDAQ, the National Market System (NMS), Over-the-Counter (OTC) equity securities, and trades executed otherwise than on an exchange. It cuts user query time exponentially over the system it replaces by compiling data as it is received rather than compiling information on demand, reducing one five-hour query to a mere 11 seconds.

WHAT IS FastOLA?

MC: FastOLA is a custom application analytics tool that stands for Fast Order Lifecycle Assembly. Every time an order is placed for a security, there are a series of events regarding how the order is filled or eventually cancelled. FastOLA reconstructs the orders from origination through execution or cancellation by creating the linkages into an order lifecycle assembly. This gives a full picture of what happens to an order over time and helps to inform decision-making as to whether a rule violation has occurred.

WHY DOES FAST MATTER?

MC: If you have a piece of software that takes hours to run a query, you don’t want to use it. We understand that. We are computing the Order Lifecycle Assembly (OLA) as we receive the data as opposed to computing it at the time when the user submits a query. If I run an OLA that is 500,000 rows, it will return to the user in under 30 seconds. We also use caching strategies to make subsequent runs of the same OLA even faster. Once you get an answer back, you can customize your view of the data to perform additional analytics interactively.

WHO USES FastOLA?

MC: FastOLA is used internally at FINRA by market regulation analysts and their management.

HOW DOES AN ANALYST USE FastOLA?

MC: The complexity of the market has increased significantly with advancement in technology. FastOLA helps market regulation analysts replay what has happened in the market. It does this by enabling users to follow the order flow from origination to execution or cancellation. They use FastOLA to help illuminate potential rule violations in the market and evidence of incidents. When an analyst is looking at audit trail events for a particular security traded by a particular firm, they have the ability to get the associated order lifecycle for each event. They can look at the order lifecycle for a stock that was originated through a specific firm and see how the order was divided and routed to various exchanges and ultimately filled.