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

Recorded Webinar: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of this transition are improved operational efficiency as manual processes are replaced by faster, more accurate automated...

BLOG

Chainlink Brings 24/5 U.S. Equities Data Onchain, Targeting Always-On Equity Markets

Chainlink, the blockchain technology company, has launched 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, a new market-data service designed to support continuous, onchain trading of U.S. stocks and ETFs beyond standard market hours. The service provides sub-second equity pricing across regular, pre-market, post-market and overnight sessions, addressing a longstanding structural mismatch between always-on blockchain-based markets and time-bound U.S....

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

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...