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

A-Team Insight Blogs

Not Much Ado About …

Subscribe to our newsletter

Something or nothing? I guess it depends on one’s POV. I’m referring to today’s deadline for implementing SEC rule 15c3-5 – aka the Market Access Rule – which bans naked sponsored access. While parts of that rule – related to aggregated risk and covering fixed income securities – now do not need to be complied with until November, the big part covering pre-trade risk for individual trades is now in force.

I kind of expected more fanfare today but it didn’t come, suggesting to me that most, if not all, have figured out a way to comply – whatever compliance means because as written the rule is pretty vague. Expect that to lead to some issues down the line as it’s determined that not all pre-trade systems have been created as equals. Which will also explain – in part at least – why some will have less latency as others.

We have seen a couple of announcements this week – from Nomura and ConvergEx’s RealTick unit – on enhancements to the firms’ order execution systems, with particular reference to pre-trade risk checks and how fast they are. And this morning I had a nice chat over coffee with George Salemie from RedDotNetworks, who is excited that his company’s FPGA technology has been adopted by firms (which he is not naming) to run checks in the nanosecond timespan.

[As an aside, RedDotNetworks isn’t the only adopter of FPGAs for pre-trade checks – Nomura cited their use in its announcement, and last month Fixnetix launched iX-eCute, which can process more than 20 pre-trade checks in less than 100 nanoseconds.]

Oh, and also there was a tiny acknowledgement of the new regulation at Nasdaq OMX, where Ted Myerson and Gary LaFever from the exchange’s Ften unit rang the opening bell at the Times Square MarketSite. Shameless self promotion maybe, but at least it was something!

So somehow, what I had pegged as a momentous occasion seems to have taken place without much celebration or acknowledgement. Not even a peep from the SEC.  Perhaps they’re lying low, waiting for the fallout. It’s gonna come, methinks.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

17 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline...

BLOG

Rethinking Market Data: From Lock-In to Independence

For decades, many capital markets firms have relied on legacy market data platforms that were built before the internet and have since become increasingly data vendor specific and costly to maintain. Some of these platforms, while functional, are no longer actively developed in meaningful ways, creating significant risks as expertise fades and costs spiral out...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

MiFID II Handbook

As the 3 January 2018 compliance deadline for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) approaches, A-Team Group has pulled together everything you need to know about the regulation in a precise and concise handbook. The MiFID II Handbook, commissioned by Thomson Reuters, provides a guide to aspects of the regulation that will have...