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

A-Team Insight Blogs

Occupy Latency?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Well it’s Friday, hence the wacky headline. The exact goals of the Occupy Movement might be hard for many to fathom, but their slogan “We are the 99%” has stuck in many people’s minds. That includes mine as I was completing a white paper for CFN Services on the benefits of leveraging managed infrastructure for low-latency trading.

What’s becoming clear in that world is that it’s a two tier market. Some firms will continue to spend just about anything to be the fastest, which these days means shaving single microseconds, even nanoseconds, off the latency of trading systems. But to many, many other firms, while low latency matters a lot, it does not to such an extreme degree, and other factors – like system agility, time to market, cost of operation – are just as important. So we have the 1% and the 99%, or at least a similar model.

While the 1% will continue to be cool and sexy – think co-lo, FPGAs, IPC, in-memory, over-clocking, and all those buzzwords – it’s the efforts of the 99% that will account for much of the focus and spend on low-latency technologies. And I expect managed services to be an increasingly important delivery channel for those technologies.

Check out the white paper here.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Modernising Equities Trading Infrastructure: Architecture, Resilience and the Economics of Change

Date: 14 October 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Equities markets are entering a more distributed, always-on phase. Liquidity is fragmenting across venues and geographies, trading hours are extending toward 24/5 and beyond, and market data volumes, investor expectations and competitive pressure are all rising at once. Many...

BLOG

MEMX Launches MX2 as Options Expansion Gathers Pace

MEMX Group has launched MX2 Options, its second US listed-options exchange, adding a customer-priority, pro-rata market model as the exchange operator continues to broaden its footprint in options and build towards its planned combination with BOX. MX2 began trading on 14 September, processing more than 1,500 contracts across an initial 10 symbols on its first...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, London, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 8th 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

Data Lineage Handbook

Data lineage has become a critical concern for data managers in capital markets as it is key to both regulatory compliance and business opportunity. The regulatory requirement for data lineage kicked in with BCBS 239 in 2016 and has since been extended to many other regulations that oblige firms to provide transparency and a data...