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

NovaSparks Fourth-Generation Ticker Plant Decreases Latency, Adds PCIe Card

Subscribe to our newsletter

NovaSparks has introduced a fourth-generation version of NovaTick that can decrease latency by 20% and process 10-times the number of symbols than its predecessor. The improvements result from the inclusion of Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs in the solution, which will allow banks and trading firms to accelerate their trading platforms without any compromise on scalability or feature set.

Olivier Baetz, chief operating officer at NovaSparks, says: “The platform’s format and API is identical to the last generation, and the way that it is configured and managed is identical to the third generation. We didn’t want to give up on feed coverage and robust features, but we did want to make a hardware upgrade and latency improvement that allows customers to do a lot more with a lot less hardware. The fourth generation is able to serve more use cases and includes a PCIe card, a new form factor that will go directly into the customer’s trading server.”

Luc Burgun, president and CEO at NovaSparks, adds: “The increase in NovaTick’s instrument capacity will enable full coverage of the US cash equity options markets, while its new PCIe form factor will offer a deployment option with a much lower total cost of ownership.”

In contrast to the previous platform, the fourth-generation ticker plant delivers a 20% average latency reduction for US equity markets down to 600 nanoseconds, and a 30% reduction for the CME down to 450 nanoseconds, measured wire-to-wire.

Existing NovaSparks customers will be able to upgrade to the new hardware without any change to the output format, the API, or the management and configuration software. The solution is targeted towards banks, traditional buy-side firms, and trading firms looking for low-latency solutions. The appliance version of the ticker plant is available for evaluation immediately, with the PCIe card due to be available at the end of January 2019.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Navigating the Build vs Buy Dilemma: Cloud Strategies for Accelerating Quantitative Research

Date: 20 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes For many quantitative trading firms and asset managers, building a self-provisioned historical market data environment remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps in establishing a new research capability. Sourcing data, normalising symbologies, handling corporate actions and maintaining...

BLOG

Bloomberg Enhances RMS Enterprise to Unlock Proprietary Models and Strengthen Research Oversight

Bloomberg has announced significant enhancements to its enterprise-level Research Management Solution (RMS Enterprise), introducing two new capabilities: Custom Fundamentals and Digest Alerts. The updates are designed to address long-standing data interoperability challenges within investment firms, allowing research teams to better integrate proprietary financial models into their workflows and strengthen oversight across their organisations. For many...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Spring, New York, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 9th year, the Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference managed by A-Team Group, is the premier content forum and networking event for investment firms and hedge funds.

GUIDE

Dealing with Reality – How to Ensure Data Quality in the Changing Entity Identifier Landscape

“The Global LEI will be a marathon, not a sprint” is a phrase heard more than once during our series of Hot Topic webinars that’s charted the emergence of a standard identifier for entity data. Doubtless, it will be heard again. But if we’re not exactly sprinting, we are moving pretty swiftly. Every time I...