Capital markets firms have been implementing a number of different strategies for reducing latency – from increasing network bandwidth, to implementing low latency applications, to collocation – giving rise to the question: What’s next?

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Rising market data volumes are nothing new – so why are they suddenly such a problem?
By Jeff Hudson, CEO, Vhayu.

The rise in market data volumes is becoming overwhelming. The time and cost of capturing, storing and moving market data is bringing consumers and market data users to their knees. One might well ask: what is the cause of all this? And, more pertinently, why are tick data volumes, which have always been on the rise, such a problem now?

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Everyone is keen to climb on the low latency bandwagon. This is due to several factors, not least the exponential growth in market and trade data volumes that exchanges and financial institutions are having to process. Others include the growth in derivatives and algorithmic trading, the scores of new assets and asset classes being traded, and the increase in the number of players in the financial markets, particularly in emerging economies.

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As market data volumes have exploded during the past 10 years and securities trading infrastructure has become increasingly strained, it has been firms’ networking teams that have come to the rescue by adapting technology innovations. But while Multicast, Gigabit Ethernet, better routers and switches and recently both 10 GB Ethernet and Infiniband have enabled the surge in market data, data management software infrastructure has contributed very little. Middleware messaging technology has indeed adopted multicast infrastructure to vastly improve market data consumer scalability, but the underlying improvements come directly from networking hardware advancements rather than software innovation. And multicast is often more a curse than a blessing – allowing only relatively coarse-grained distribution channels, providing less reliability than TCP/IP and negatively impacting the TCP/IP traffic of many mission critical applications on the shared corporate network.

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Market data requirements within financial firms are creating a perfect storm of complexity. The business is seeing an unprecedented doubling and tripling in quote volumes just as algorithmic specialists are asking for latency rates approaching the limits of physics. Operations will no longer let IT throw more and more servers at every problem as limits on rack space and power consumption within data centres become very real.

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The recent increases in global execution volumes have catapulted real-time analytical event processing to the forefront of investment securities trading technology. In order to create and maintain a competitive advantage, electronic trading institutions insist that their systems utilize a high-performance, low latency processing platform that is easy to develop, deploy, extend and integrate. Complex event processing (CEP) technology is now emerging as a solution to these key challenges.

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Last month, we considered why post-trade reporting in a MiFID environment will be substantially different to the way it’s done today. In this article, we’ll look at two other misconceptions about MiFID reporting.

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As a specialist in transforming and routing real-time data, Gissing Software inevitably approaches MiFID from this aspect. And it appears to us that MiFID transparency is, in effect, contributions; but contributions with a difference.

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The era of software-based market data systems running on generic server and desktop hardware is now well through its second decade. The lifeblood of any large trading floor flows through the veins of its digital data distribution system. When the flow stops, all hell breaks loose. Our firm, TS-Associates, is in the business of preventing that from happening.

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Whenever you talk to those who sell products and services in the financial sector,
their current strategy can often be summed up as ‘waiting for the good times to come back … one day’. The golden days of booming markets, global expansion and Greenspan’s famous ‘irrational exuberance’. All the things that were going to go on forever in an exponential paradise.

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Managing a technology platform for institutional investors requires real-time responsiveness and the foresight of an oracle to keep pace with increasing flows of incoming and outgoing data streams. To ensure you get ROI from your people and processes, it is necessary to evaluate them from a holistic perspective. This requires examining your post-trade processes to identify redundant or unnecessarily complicated steps that can be consolidated or eliminated.

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Pressure to cut costs by 30% or more is forcing financial institutions to change the way they operate internal workflow processes across the entire trade cycle. Swift and Financial Information Exchange (FIX) messaging, combined with new software architectures and middleware, offer the means to effect these changes and yield the required cost reductions, while at the same time delivering a radically better service.

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Like Robbie Williams, and maybe even Justin Timberlake, Web Services are evolving from their early incarnations where no one took them seriously, toward a more mature offering that’s ready to headline in the world of e-business. With core standards now set, the hype has moved on to address higher levels of functionality, such as choreography, orchestration, management and security, that underpin business processes and transactions.

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John A. McConville, CFA, principal of The McConville Group, on the first-half results,
management’s near-term guidance on revenues and prospects for the share price.

Relief, surely, was the prime sentiment among shareholders in Reuters, when it reported its first-half results last month. The numbers came in at or around expectations, a positive in and of itself, suggesting management finally has a handle on where the company is headed at least in the short term.

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When UBS purchased ‘A’ shares in four listed Chinese companies on July 9, it marked a significant new phase in China’s path towards opening its financial markets to the outside world; QFII, for Qualified Foreign Institutional Investment, had kicked off.

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Reading the recent spate of global market share statistics for the market data business, one could be forgiven for asking ‘So what? Market share is always a lagging indicator of what has been happening in the market over the previous year or two, and anecdotal reporting has already provided a fairly informed view of trends and movements between the market data providers.

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Reading the recent spate of global market share statistics for the market data business, one could be forgiven for asking ‘So what? Market share is always a lagging indicator of what has been happening in the market over the previous year or two, and anecdotal reporting has already provided a fairly informed view of trends and movements between the market data providers.

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Market pressures have sent securities industry players scrambling for savings and efficiencies, yet few dare to take on the massive task of wringing order from the costly and redundant world of financial data systems. Those who take the challenge may be surprised to find what tools exist for turning overlapping information into efficient standardized data.

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Making predictions regarding the economy and related financial matters is a risky business. Alan Greenspan has basically given up making them and the safest bet in the realm of prognostication is to stick with the tried and tested “It’s still just as bad out there.”

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With market data second only to salaries as an expense, the ongoing market situation is forcing financial institutions to take a closer look at managing their financial information costs. But market data costs aren’t easy to measure; many cost components are hidden within other cost categories. What’s more, many firms lack the internal political will to take a firm hand to market data – and the suppliers themselves are loath to help find ways to reduce expenditures.

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