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: How to move to a modern, component based trading architecture using a Buy AND Build approach

Date: 7 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes To remain competitive in today’s electronic markets, firms need trading architectures that support rapid innovation, effortless integration of new capabilities, and the agility to respond to shifting market demands. This is prompting technology leaders to move beyond the traditional...

BLOG

BMLL and Tradefeedr Partner to Build AI-Ready Analytics Layer for Equities and Futures

BMLL Technologies, the independent provider of harmonised historical order book data, and Tradefeedr, the network-based trading analytics platform, have announced a partnership to extend Tradefeedr’s analytics capabilities into equities and futures. The initiative, which includes a year-long industry pilot, represents Tradefeedr’s first move beyond its established FX analytics franchise and signals a broader ambition to...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

The Data Management Implications of Solvency II

This special report accompanies a webinar we held on the popular topic of The Data Management Implications of Solvency II, discussing the data implications for asset managers and their custodians and asset servicers. You can register here to get immediate access to the Special Report.