Now that we understand the high-level design, let’s take a look at the API design.

Clients interact with the stock exchange via the brokers to place orders, view executions, view market data, download historical data for analysis, etc. We use the RESTful conventions for the API below to specify the interface between the brokers and the client gateway. Refer to the “Data models” section for the resources mentioned below.

Note that the REST API might not satisfy the latency requirements of institutional clients like hedge funds. The specialized software built for these institutions likely uses a different protocol, but no matter what it is, the basic functionality mentioned below needs to be supported.