It’s becoming quite a frequent event – that being the press release from marketdatapeaks.com about a new record high as measured using the Exegy ticker plant appliance that powers it. Today, the release said the record had been pushed up to 3,732,957 messages per second at 9.54am. The previous peak was 3,449,856 mps, which was recorded on Friday.
What’s causing these peaks? Good old news it seems. Today’s trading was driven by some positive consumer confidence data and better than expected house price reports. That led market makers to rapidly change pricing and order books – and thus data feeds pumped out 800,829 mps. And of course the derivatives markets then followed suit on thousands of contracts based on the underlying cash markets, resulting in 2,516,437 mps. The US stock markets all changed their top-of-book quotes in reaction – another 364,689 mps of quotes – and their exchange trading systems reported 49,290 mps. It all adds up (though not to the top-line total for some reason).
Apparently, previous recently reported peaks were also down to market reactions to news events. So is there a trend with all this good and bad news? Or some kind of connection? Not the case says Exegy’s Jeff Wells, who reckons it’s just “lots of market turbulance” though he also noted that several exchanges have been upgrading their technology – and thus increasing capacity.
So it’s not just a low-latency arms race that’s still happening out there, but also a throughput arms race, as exchanges, liquidity venues and market participants (as well as network and connectivity providers) all upgrade to cope with new peaks, and by so doing contribute to new peaks. Something tells me this one will run and run.
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