About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Occupy Latency?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Well it’s Friday, hence the wacky headline. The exact goals of the Occupy Movement might be hard for many to fathom, but their slogan “We are the 99%” has stuck in many people’s minds. That includes mine as I was completing a white paper for CFN Services on the benefits of leveraging managed infrastructure for low-latency trading.

What’s becoming clear in that world is that it’s a two tier market. Some firms will continue to spend just about anything to be the fastest, which these days means shaving single microseconds, even nanoseconds, off the latency of trading systems. But to many, many other firms, while low latency matters a lot, it does not to such an extreme degree, and other factors – like system agility, time to market, cost of operation – are just as important. So we have the 1% and the 99%, or at least a similar model.

While the 1% will continue to be cool and sexy – think co-lo, FPGAs, IPC, in-memory, over-clocking, and all those buzzwords – it’s the efforts of the 99% that will account for much of the focus and spend on low-latency technologies. And I expect managed services to be an increasingly important delivery channel for those technologies.

Check out the white paper here.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Navigating the Build vs Buy Dilemma: Cloud Strategies for Accelerating Quantitative Research

For many quantitative trading firms and asset managers, building a self-provisioned historical market data environment remains one of the most time-consuming and resource-intensive steps in establishing a new research capability. Sourcing data, normalising symbologies, handling corporate actions and maintaining infrastructure can take months and absorb significant budget before a single model is tested. At the...

BLOG

Quantum Readiness in Trading: Why Cryptography and Data Governance Matter More Than Qubits

Quantum computing is becoming one of the most widely discussed emerging technologies in financial markets infrastructure. In industry commentary, the technology is often framed either as a revolutionary engine for trading performance or as an existential threat to the cryptographic systems that secure global finance. In practice however, the near-term impact is likely to be...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 17th year, Data Management Summit (DMS) London returns In April 2027, to explore how to use data and AI to drive measurable business outcomes reliably, repeatedly and at scale.

GUIDE

Preparing For Primetime – How to Benefit from the Global LEI

They say time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, and so it seems the industry have been having a blast with its preparations for the introduction of the global legal entity identifier (LEI) next month. But now it’s time to get serious. To date, much of the industry debate has centred on the identifier itself: its...