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: Agility as Alpha: How Trading Infrastructure Determines Who Wins in Volatile Markets

Date: 21 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Tariff shocks, geopolitical realignment and macroeconomic regime shifts are redrawing the investment landscape faster than most firms’ technology stacks can keep up. For hedge funds and asset managers, the ability to move quickly into new asset classes, geographies or...

BLOG

The Matching Engine Was Never the Hard Part: What 24/7 Really Demands of Exchange Architecture

The framing has become familiar. Digital asset exchanges, prediction markets and retail-driven platforms have normalised continuous trading. Traditional venues, with their nightly batch cycles and weekly maintenance windows, are now playing catch-up as they extend hours, tokenise assets and reach for new distribution models. The conventional answer is to point at the matching engine and...

EVENT

TEST Event page 1

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

Pricing and Valuations

This special report accompanies a webinar we held a webinar on the popular topic of Pricing and Valuations, discussing issues such as transparency of pricing and how to ensure data quality. You can register here to get immediate access to the Special Report.