SERVICES
We bridge the communication gap between the empirical practitioner, quantitative analysis, and the machine. We provide licensable software tools or develop from scratch to meet your needs.
“But the financial industry is supremely pragmatic. While it may genuflect to the old icons, it invests its research dollars in the search for newer, better gods.”
— Benoit Mandelbrot, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
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software development & Licensing
You have an idea. You need expert help bringing the idea to fruition. We work with firms in all areas—whether that means developing a proprietary financial model or a mobile app for college football teams. If you can’t afford to buy a solution outright, we are flexible: every success story requires a different relationship.
If you already have existing products that you work with or need fine tuning, we can help! We have years of experience working with many languages and frameworks such as C#, C++, WPF, MAUI, Qt, and Blazor. For the trading shops that use third-party trading platforms, we know most of the ins and outs through years of experience.
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Most of our broker-dealer clients take advantage of our full FINRA CAT support suite. This low-touch service is individually tailored to the firm. We take care of everything possible. This includes, but is not limited to: CAT submission/repairs/corrections for both electronic and manual orders, WORM archiving, communications with FINRA, and CAIS management.
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We license portions of our codebase. Besides helpful tools and extensions, clients can also subscribe to our CAT packages to help out their own internal development.
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We’ve teamed up with Parker Sports Group, LLC to write a mobile application for football coaches. Our trail dogs are responsible for building and maintaining not only the application itself but also the entire technology and software stack required to support it. Designed by the partners at Parker Sports Group, LLC, the features of Zeus Football revolutionize card drawing and collaboration by providing a clean interface to draw, organize, and prepare cards for practice. Scouting reports can also be generated. On top of everything, all data is securely synchronized and kept up-to-date among an entire team’s set of mobile devices. For more information, visit www.zeusfootball.com
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Trail Dog Software continues to help build the entire software suite for a boutique prop trading firm that specializes in market-making financial derivatives. The suite supports three front-office applications and many backend services, distributed across over 20 servers and personal computers spanning from coast to coast. Everything from the front-office applications to the proprietary mathematical models are custom built in the firm’s image.
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We are developing more AI-centric tools like Sparky to help people find the information they need and achieve their goals. Coming soon is “Leo”, an AI-pup that is still training to help individuals improve their test scores.
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Consulting
We provide consulting services on every domain that we have expertise in finance, software, applied mathematics, and science.
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A number of our clients utilize Trail Dogs to provide oversight over CAT that FINRA expects you to have. The current expectation from FINRA is that both daily and monthly CAT reviews of varying degrees are being conducted internally. We provide the oversight firm’s need to meet FINRA’s expectations, over both our own work and others.
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It always helps to have an independent set of fresh eyes looking over your work. Being experienced and deep in the CAT weeds, firms come to us to evaluate their internally-developed CAT software and processes. We provide peace of mind by further ensuring firms meet the robustness accuracy standards demanded by FINRA. At the end of the reviews we provide a formal report and write up. We conduct the exact same review on our own internal processes regularly.
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Quantitative & Algorithmic development
We bridge the communication gaps between the empirical practitioner, quantitative analysis, and the machine.
Translating empirical knowledge into quantitative models is one of our specialties. We also love turning published papers into accessible software algorithms. If you need something completely new and fresh, we work with leading experts to create knowledge and provide you with the edge you need to succeed.
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For one of or clients, we translate their understanding of intra-expiration American options into a volatility smile model. This provides the firm with two major benefits:
Providing volatilities that are directly translated from a seasoned trader’s understanding.
Providing information about the skew and shape of the volatility surface.
As time goes on, we continue to expand and tweak the model to ensure the firm maintains their edge as market conditions evolve.
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Many firms utilize third party trading systems to satisfy their needs. These systems often provide significant extensibility and customization. The trouble is, many who use these systems do not have experience writing optimized software or integrating with a 3rd-party API, which is almost always a required skillset when taking advantage of platform extensibility and customizability.
Luckily, we do have the requisite experience and skillset.
Our clients utilize us to integrate their ideas into the trading platform. Rather than spending time trying to integrate and optimize quoting scripts, firms enlist Trail Dogs to develop the desired behavior so that they can spend more time trading.
Trail Dogs Articles and Resources
