This maybe a little obtuse… but it sums up the financial markets nicely… it’s from the message board of FIX Protocol, the standard for electronic trading of financial securities… it’s a two way comment… and just a little view into how market practices create market structure… and the dedication and cleverness of those who help markets operate…
> I have written a FIX broker simulator in Java which tests three
> different Buy side systems (two of them in FIX.4.2 and one in FIX.4.0)
> and none of them reject messages with intermixed header and body tags
> as incorrect.
You have been lucky then.
The systems I preside over will actually accept messages where the fields are not in header/body/trailer order because we operate under the concept of:
“Be tolerant when receiving and strictly in conformance when sending”.
I’m sure our liberal policy has nothing to do with the “order flow = revenue” equation 
Nonetheless, I definitely would not recommend that anyone relies on the other end of a FIX session being anything other than in strict conformance with the standards.
If everyone follows the “Be tolerant when receiving and strictly in conformance when sending” concept, we will all be sending out strictly conforming messages and therefore not needing to be tolerant when receiving. I presume this will all come to pass shortly after I have posted this message.
Standards are a great thing.
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