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

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 discovering that value is constrained not by models, but by the quality of the content, architecture,...

BLOG

BCG Expand: Market Data Industry Tops $50bn as Growth Normalises and Cost Discipline Tightens

Global market data industry revenues surpassed $50bn for the first time in 2025, reaching $50.5bn, according to BCG Expand’s latest Market Data Market Sizing report. Total revenues grew 6.4% in 2025, down from 6.6% in 2024 and 8.3% in 2023, signalling a moderation after several years of stronger expansion. The slowdown, however, does not point...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

Now in its 3rd year, the AI in Capital Markets Summit returns with a focus on the practicalities of onboarding AI enterprise wide for business value creation. Whilst AI offers huge potential to revolutionise capital markets operations many are struggling to move beyond pilot phase to generate substantial value from AI.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2024 – Twelfth Edition

Welcome to the twelfth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and useful guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change and the data and data management requirements of compliance. The handbook covers regulation in Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This edition of the handbook includes a detailed review of acts, plans and...