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

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

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

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 infrastructure can take months and absorb significant budget before a single model is tested. At the...

BLOG

Celebrating Excellence at the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2026

The pace of change across trading technology shows no sign of slowing. As markets become more complex, data-intensive and performance-driven, firms are rethinking how infrastructure, analytics and execution workflows interconnect across the trading lifecycle. Against this backdrop, the TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2026 brought the industry together to recognise the solution providers delivering measurable impact...

EVENT

TEST Event page 2

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

BCBS 239 Data Management Handbook

Our 2015/2016 edition of the BCBS 239 Data Management Handbook has arrived! Printed copies went like hotcakes at our Data Management Summit in New York but you can download your own copy here and get access to detailed information on the  principles and implications of BCBS 239 on Data Management. This Handbook provides an at-a-glance...