FPGA-based Fast Cancellation

How Magmio's Fast Canceler Protects Your Quotes in Nanoseconds and Why Canceling an Order Can Be Just as Critical as Placing OneFPGA-based fast cancellation

Canceling an order too late costs money. In latency-sensitive strategies, the difference between a controlled exit and getting picked off often comes down to a few hundred nanoseconds, and that is exactly where software hits its ceiling.

The Problem

Markets move in microseconds. A quote that made sense 1 microsecond ago can become a liability the moment a large order hits the book. Software-based systems face a structural challenge here. When the trading engine decides to cancel, the message still has to travel through the network stack and the PCIe bus. Even on a well-optimized system with kernel bypass, that takes hundreds of nanoseconds or single-digit microseconds. In a fast market, that is a long time to be exposed.

The FPGA Solution

A hardware fast canceler removes the software layer from the cancellation path entirely. The logic lives on the FPGA card, monitoring market data in real time. The moment a trigger condition is met — a price crossing a threshold, a large trade, a correlated instrument moving — the FPGA fires the cancel message autonomously, without ever touching the host CPU. The latency drops near 100 ns.

This matters most for quote-driven strategies, where even a slight delay increases adverse selection exposure, especially during large market events, when firms need to pull all open orders as fast as physically possible.

How Magmio Does It

Clients have a choice between predefined cancel logic provided by Magmio and defining their own custom cancellation triggers in C++. Magmio framework allows the client to compile that logic into FPGA hardware without any previous FPGA expertise.

The canceler runs in parallel with the trading strategy, watching the same market data feed, with deterministic, jitter-free latency. No changes are required in the current trading system. You plug in the fast canceler system and watch your PnL go up.

Getting your quote quickly into the queue matters.

Getting out just as fast can matter even more.