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: From Monolith to Modular: Architecting Equity Trading Platforms for 24/5 and Beyond

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

Reconciliation No Longer Has Time On Its Side as T+1 Approaches

By John Bevil, senior product manager at Xceptor. Europe’s capital markets firms are entering the most consequential phase of T+1 preparation. From 11 October 2027, trades executed in European markets are expected to settle one business day after trade date, reducing the settlement cycle from T+2 to T+1. More than 4 trillion euros of securities...

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

The Global LEI System – Slow but Sure

After what looked like a slow start to the summer, the initiative to establish a global standard for legal entity identifiers (LEIs) took a series of significant leaps forward during August, that appears to have put the project firmly back on track. If the marketplace felt a little reticent in June and July, it could...