About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Time Stamps Key To Market Data Performance, TCA Provider Tells Webinar

Subscribe to our newsletter

To get the highest performance possible from managing market data operations, especially connectivity, a deterministic approach may not be the only one that should be taken, observed Louis Lovas, director of solutions at OneMarketData, who spoke in a December 8 webinar sponsored by the transaction cost analysis provider, and hosted by Intelligent Trading Technology and A-Team Group.

“If you consider from the consuming applications for data that data quality not only includes the idea of determinate behavior, but also elements that are more natural to the applications for firms that are trading across markets, that’s where you want the consistency in symbols and symbol continuity across market centers,” Lovas said.

Separating the parts of a transaction can affect how data consumers get information about that transaction, observed Mark Reece, director of professional services at MCO Europe, a financial data processing technology provider. “Depending on what you’re trying to do, you may impact the latency of your whole market data system,” he said. “Trades might impact or orders might be impacted by bursts of arrivals of market data. Similarly, if you’re a high-frequency market maker who is doing moving in futures and options, a single ticket underlying may result in a firestorm of outgoing quote updates from you. So you need to be very careful about separating those parts.”

Latency goals in relation to market data operations performance can vary, according to Ted Hruzd, senior infrastructure architect at RBC. “The goals of prop traders, market makers, high-frequency traders and arbitragers are much more latency sensitive,” he said. “Equities and futures traders are more apt to opt for ultra-low-latency. FX is lagging behind bond and commodity trading, but there have been some recent advances in electronic trading for corporate bonds.”

To best support transaction cost analysis or market impact analysis, time-stamp precision and synchronization is “vital,” said Lovas, “particularly for cross-market price discovery, or consolidation or aggregation across markets.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Optimising cloud, marketplaces & managed data services

Financial institutions are under mounting pressure to rethink how they source, manage and distribute market data. Rising data volumes, multi-cloud adoption and the operational demands of regulations such as DORA are exposing the limits of legacy infrastructure, and driving firms toward managed services and cloud-native delivery models that can offer greater scalability, resilience and cost...

BLOG

Digital Assets Move Closer to the Institutional Trading Stack as Caplin Launches Hosted Platform

Institutional digital asset trading is beginning to confront a familiar problem: as the market grows, the technology supporting it has to move beyond specialist systems and manual workflows towards the kind of integrated infrastructure already established in markets such as FX. That shift is behind the launch of a new hosted, white-label digital asset trading...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 17th year, Data Management Summit (DMS) London returns In April 2027, to explore how to use data and AI to drive measurable business outcomes reliably, repeatedly and at scale.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...