Patent ID: 8600856

Claim:
An apparatus for processing financial market data, the apparatus comprising: a memory for storing financial market data associated with a plurality of financial instruments, the stored financial market data including a plurality of synthetic financial instrument records, each synthetic financial instrument record comprising a data field and being associated with a synthetic financial instrument, the synthetic financial instruments being representative of a plurality of groups of financial instruments; and a reconfigurable logic device for communication with the memory, the reconfigurable logic device comprising a plurality of firmware application modules (FAMs) arranged in a pipeline, the pipeline comprising a first FAM and a second FAM, the second FAM being downstream from the first FAM; wherein the first FAM is configured to (1) receive a plurality of streaming financial market data messages, each of the streaming financial market data messages being associated with a financial instrument and comprising (i) a symbol string for identifying the message's associated financial instrument and (ii) financial market data that is representative of a price for the message's associated financial instrument, (2) map the symbol strings to a plurality of internal symbol IDs for the messages' associated financial instruments, and (3) generate a plurality of output messages comprising the internal symbol IDs; and wherein the second FAM is configured to (1) receive the internal symbol IDs and the financial market data, and (2) perform a plurality of programmatic record generation operations in response to the received internal symbol IDs and the received financial market data to compute a plurality of updated fields for a plurality of the synthetic financial instrument records, and (3) store the computed updated fields in the memory in association with the synthetic financial instrument records; and wherein the first FAM and the second FAM are configured to operate simultaneously with respect to each other in a pipelined fashion.