Market Pricing Automation
Founder's prior work, generalized
Automated security pricing workflows involving external market data retrieval, validation, transformation and downstream processing.
This case study has been intentionally generalized to protect confidential business information.
Overview
An automated workflow that retrieves security prices from an external market-data service, checks them, and prepares them for the processes that use them downstream.
The problem
Security prices have to be retrieved and checked on a regular schedule, and a missing or unreliable price affects everything downstream that depends on it.
The solution
A scheduled batch process that handles retrieval, validation and hand-off to downstream processing.
- Automated retrieval of market data through a REST API.
- Security filtering, so only the relevant securities are requested and processed.
- Pricing validation before prices are used.
- Fallback logic for when a price cannot be used as retrieved.
- Transformation into the format downstream processing expects.
- Scheduled execution with exception handling and production monitoring.
Architecture
- Scheduled batch jobStarts each pricing run
- Market-data APIExternal price retrieval
- Validation and fallbackChecks, filtering and fallback rules
- SQL ServerTransformation and storage
- Downstream processingProcesses that consume the prices
Key engineering decisions
Filter before requesting
Security filtering narrows each run to the securities that need a price, keeping requests to the external service focused.
Plan for missing prices
Fallback logic is part of the design from the start, because a pricing run has to finish sensibly even when some prices are unavailable.
Validate, then hand off
Prices are validated before they reach downstream processing, so problems are caught at the point they enter the system.
Challenges
An external dependency on a schedule
The workflow depends on a third-party API being available and returning complete data at the time the job runs.
Troubleshooting API issues in production
When a run fails or returns unexpected results, the cause has to be traced between the external API, the batch process and the database.
Reliability & security
Pricing validation
Retrieved prices are checked before use.
Fallback logic
Defined behaviour for prices that are missing or unusable.
Exception handling
Problems are captured for follow-up rather than silently dropped.
Production monitoring
Scheduled runs are monitored and supported in production.
Results & impact
- Security prices are retrieved, checked and passed on automatically, on a schedule.
- Validation and fallback rules make the prices passed downstream more dependable.