XR Trading Resolves Costly Exchange-Side Bug in Record Time with Undo’s Time Travel Debugging
CAMBRIDGE, March 18, 2025 – XR Trading, a leading high-frequency trading (HFT) firm, successfully diagnosed and resolved a critical exchange-side order rejection issue—saving an estimated $15,000 per day in potential losses. By leveraging Undo’s time travel debugging technology, XR Trading’s engineering team identified the root cause in just one hour, achieving a resolution before competitors even noticed the issue.
Identifying the Challenge: Costly Order Rejections
Without any software changes on their end, XR Trading began experiencing unexpected rejections on orders that had been operating flawlessly for years. The impact was immediate and severe, as each rejected order translated directly into lost trading opportunities, accumulating to an estimated $15,000 per day in unrealized revenue.
Traditional debugging tools like GDB proved inefficient in diagnosing the issue, as the engineering team needed to track messages across a complex 12-component software stack with hundreds of method calls. The conventional approach was painstakingly slow, requiring engineers to step through thousands of lines of code manually, restarting each time they overstepped a critical function.
The Solution: Rapid Debugging with Undo’s Time Travel Debugging
To quickly pinpoint the issue, XR Trading turned to Undo’s time travel debugging technology, which allowed engineers to navigate through code execution in reverse, drastically reducing debugging time. With Undo, the team was able to:
- Instantly jump to the exact moment the order type was modified using the ‘last’ command—eliminating the need to manually trace execution paths.
- Use reverse execution tools like reverse-next and reverse-continue to step back through the program’s history and identify the precise function calls affecting the order type.
- Resolve the issue within just one hour, allowing XR Trading to deploy a workaround and resume trading before competitors even became aware of the problem.
Zephaniah Hill, Software Engineer at XR Trading explains:
“We experienced unexpected rejections from the exchange on orders that we have been sending for years—without any software changes on our end. With Undo, it took me just one hour to diagnose the issue, allowing us to quickly implement a fix and resume trading before our competitors reacted.”
Business Impact: Gaining a Competitive Edge
The bug was determined to be exchange-side, meaning competitors using similar order types would also experience failures—giving XR Trading an advantage by solving the issue first. Because Undo’s debugging solution enabled XR Trading to react immediately, they were able to continue trading while competitors remained stalled, seizing an opportunity in the high-stakes world of HFT where milliseconds define success.
Beyond resolving a single bug, Undo’s technology set a new benchmark for debugging efficiency in high-frequency trading. In a market where every millisecond matters, Undo delivered real business value by enabling the XR Trading engineering team to diagnose and resolve the issue faster than its competitors. Quickly resolving the issue gave XR Trading a temporary advantage—showcasing how better tools impact business outcomes.
Setting a New Standard for Debugging in HFT
For firms operating in high-frequency trading, software reliability and rapid issue resolution are essential for maintaining market leadership. Undo’s time travel debugging solution has proven to be a game-changer, cutting debugging time from days to hours and providing a crucial competitive advantage.
About XR Trading
XR Trading is a leading proprietary trading firm specializing in high-frequency trading strategies. The firm leverages cutting-edge technology and deep quantitative research to achieve superior execution in global financial markets.
About Undo
Undo provides advanced debugging solutions that help engineering teams rapidly diagnose and fix software failures in large-scale codebases. By enabling software engineers working on complex systems to record and replay program execution, Undo helps them release on schedule, ensure stability at scale, and resolve customer issues faster.
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