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: How to move to a modern, component based trading architecture using a Buy AND Build approach

Date: 7 May 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes To remain competitive in today’s electronic markets, firms need trading architectures that support rapid innovation, effortless integration of new capabilities, and the agility to respond to shifting market demands. This is prompting technology leaders to move beyond the traditional...

BLOG

xyt Layers Natural-Language AI onto Trading Data Platform as Race for AI-Ready Analytics Intensifies

xyt, the independent trading data intelligence platform formerly known as big xyt, has introduced a set of AI-powered capabilities designed to let clients query its datasets in natural language, integrate its data into their own AI environments, and generate executable analytical outputs from a prompt. The announcement positions the firm in an increasingly crowded field...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Tackling the Data Management Challenges of FATCA

As the July 1, 2014 deadline for compliance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – or FATCA – approaches, financial institutions around the world are working to ensure their data management and operational systems will meet the requirements of the US legislation. This report discusses the requirements of FATCA and how the legislation is...