Direct exchange feeds – and real-time data feeds generated by alternative trading systems – have entered the realm of mainstream for today’s most demanding trading environments. By sidestepping the aggregation and normalisation process required for consolidated data feeds, direct feeds offer the fastest possible access to rapidly updating market prices, used by high frequency traders and other alpha seekers to drive their trading models.

These super-fast, by definition highly focused, data feeds represent in essence the third generation of feed-based delivery of market data. They also possibly represent the endgame as far as the use of data feeds by locally deployed trading applications is concerned, and may give rise to mouth-watering possibilities like the market data cloud. Indeed, the use of proximity hosting and collocation of trading applications signals a step in this direction.

But how did we get to this point?

Find out more in this special report.

Contributors:

  Direct Data Feed Services (1,019.9 KiB)