Perseus Telecom has rolled out a certified time service to allow trading firms to accurately timestamp market data and transactions for regulatory and algorithmic trading purposes. The service taps technology from Certichron, which Perseus is now selling and maintaining at a number of market data centres, with more to come.
Certified time is a proprietary and audited time delivery service that relies on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official timescale of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), based in Boulder, CO. Time servers located in major market data centres are synchronised to NIST with up to picosecond accuracy, and provide timestamps for trading applications.
[See this Q&A for more information on Certichron.]
Regulations and initiatives including Finra’s Order Audit Trail System (OATS) and the planned Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) from the SEC require timestamp synchronisation with NIST. As well as regulatory compliance, HFT firms – many of which are already Perseus customers – are seeking very granular timestamps to tune their algorithms.
Perseus has taken over the operation of a number of time server deployments already made by Certichron, including at Nasdaq OMX and Equinix, Savvis and Telx data centres in New York City and New Jersey. Also already deployed are servers at 350 East Cermak Street in Chicago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange data centre in Aurora, IL, and Coresite’s K Street facility in Washington, DC. Rollout to key data centres in Europe is next on the list.
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