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

Date: 20 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes 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...

BLOG

When Margin Moves Upstream: How TT is Reworking Trading Decisions After the OpenGamma Deal

More than a month after completing its acquisition of OpenGamma, Trading Technologies is beginning to articulate how the deal is intended to change the way firms think about margin, capital efficiency, and trading decision-making. Rather than positioning margin as a downstream risk or treasury concern, TT is now framing capital efficiency as a front-office variable...

EVENT

RepRisk Sustainability Breakfast Roundtable London

The London sustainability breakfast is part of the global roundtable thought leadership event series hosted by RepRisk in key markets, including, New York, Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2026.

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...