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

Perplexed By Percentages

Subscribe to our newsletter

A couple of weeks ago, together with Reuters, we conducted a survey of the marketplace to find out how well latency measurement is entrenched, and what users thought of datafeed providers and measurement tool vendors. And we asked them to comment on their current market data handling infrastructures too. 

One figure that came back – which I had an instant gut reaction against – is that 39 per cent of respondents reckon their systems are adequate to cope with increasing market data volumes. To me, this number seemed just too high, given what we are being told to expect about data rates from OPRA, etc. A further 31 per cent reckoned their systems would be able to cope following planned upgrades.

Contrast those figures with just 24 per cent suggesting that measurement/monitoring tools are currently adequate (the rest say that tools are not good enough, or are still investigating tools, including finding out what’s out there because they don’t know of any). There’s an old adage in the IT industry and I’ve heard it a lot of late. It’s that unless one can monitor/measure it, one can’t manage it.

Personally, I reckon many of the 39 per cent are large investors in silicon – not the silicon of microprocessors, but the silicon found in large buckets of sand.

Am I being harsh? Of course, I’d be delighted to hear more from you on this subject.

Until next time … here’s some good music.

[tags]OPRA,benchmarks,latency measurement,latency monitoring[/tags]

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Reviewing the Latency Landscape and the Next Generation of Ultra-Low Latency Infrastructure

Date: 17 September 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Ultra-low latency is no longer the preserve of a handful of proprietary trading firms. As new asset classes electronify, data volumes surge, and regulatory expectations around execution quality and resilience tighten, the performance demands on trading infrastructure are broadening...

BLOG

Watching the Future: The Top 10 Surveillance and Compliance Challenges in Prediction Markets

By Joe Schifano, Global Head of Regulatory Affairs, Eventus. Prediction markets are quickly becoming the next frontier of finance – a new class of markets where people trade on what they believe will happen next. From election results to interest rate fluctuations, these platforms turn collective judgment into tradable data. But as prediction markets move...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Best Practice Client Onboarding

Client onboarding is central to the success of banks, yet it continues to present challenges and the benefits of getting it right are difficult to achieve. The challenges arise from siloed systems, manual processes and poor entity data quality. The potential benefits of successful implementation include excellent client experience, improved client acquisition and loyalty, new business opportunities, reductions in costs, competitive advantage, and confidence in compliance.