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: From Data to Alpha: AI Strategies for Taming Unstructured Data

Date: 16 April 2026 Time: 9:00am ET / 2:00pm London / 3:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Unstructured data and text now accounts for the majority of information flowing through financial markets organisations, spanning research content, corporate disclosures, communications, alternative data, and internal documents. While AI has created new opportunities to extract signals, many firms are...

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

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

Managing Valuations Data for Optimal Risk Management

The US corporate actions market has long been characterised as paper-based and manually intensive, but it seems that much progress is being made of late to tackle the lack of automation due to the introduction of four little letters: XBRL. According to a survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and standards...