We make market microstructure visible.
Most trading platforms show you what happened. VisualHFT shows you why — in real time, down to the microsecond.
We exist because the people who build and run trading systems deserve to see what's actually happening inside them: how algorithms behave under pressure, where liquidity shifts, and what the order flow is really telling you. Not after the fact. Right now.
VisualHFT is a real-time analytics platform for market microstructure — built for quants, by quants.
The Story
VisualHFT started in production, not in a pitch deck.
While building high-frequency trading systems for hedge funds, our founder kept running into the same problem: every time a new algorithm was deployed, there was no good way to see what it was actually doing. Was it performing as expected? Was there a subtle issue buried in the order flow? The only way to find out was to dig through logs after the fact — by which time, the damage was already done.
So he built a tool to fix that. A way to visualize algorithm behavior, market dynamics, and infrastructure health in real time, with microsecond precision.
That tool became VisualHFT.
2019
We open-sourced the platform — not as a marketing play, but because we believed the quant community would make it better. And they did. Contributors, researchers, and traders from around the world started using it, extending it, and pushing it in directions we hadn't anticipated.
Today
VisualHFT is evolving into a full commercial platform — while staying true to its open-source roots. We're building enterprise-grade analytics on top of a community-driven foundation, because we believe that's how the best tools get made.
Three Pillars
Open-Source Foundation
Built in the open since 2019. Our core analytics engine is open-source, supported by a growing community of contributors, plugin developers, and quant researchers. The community isn't a side project — it's a fundamental part of how VisualHFT evolves.
Academic Partnerships
We're working with universities and research groups to advance the study of market microstructure. Through research data access programs, co-authored papers, and our Partner Quant Program, we're bridging the gap between academic research and production trading systems.
Commercial Platform
For professionals and institutions who need more. The commercial layer adds enterprise-grade features — AI-powered insights, advanced surveillance, deeper exchange integrations, and dedicated support — built on top of the same open-source foundation.
The Founder
Ariel Silahian is a software engineer with over 20 years of experience in electronic trading. Having architected high-performance trading platforms for investment banks and hedge funds, Ariel brings deep, hands-on expertise in the systems that power modern markets.
A published author on building high-performance trading systems and an active independent consultant to financial institutions, Ariel founded VisualHFT to solve a problem that kept coming up throughout a career spent at the intersection of software engineering and quantitative finance: the tools to understand what trading systems are doing in real time simply didn't exist.
Now they do.
Get in Touch
General inquiries
hello@visualhft.com