The US Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) has been a long time in the making, but progress has been made recently with the selection of Exegy’s packet capture service to provide trade timestamps to the CAT, and a move by the FIX trading community to plan a FIX CAT working group to help firms with implementation.
The use of Exegy’s packet capture service excuses CAT developer Thesys Technologies from building its own timestamp mechanism and provides on-demand access to complete recordings of market data feeds in their native formats for the US equities and options markets.
James O’Donnell, CEO at Exegy says: “The determination by the CAT to use the Exegy packet capture service underscores the value of our high-quality market data, ease of integration and affordability.” The Exegy service will also provide market participants with the same data with the same timestamps as the date used by the CAT system.
FIX involvement in the CAT includes collaboration with the Financial Information Forum (FIF) to create a FIX CAT working group looking specifically at where FIX coverage is necessary to support CAT reporting requirements. Potential examples of FIX intervention include a FIX to CAT mapping exercise to determine which existing FIX tags can be used to support CAT reporting.
The working group invites industry feedback on areas it should be looking at from a FIX implementation perspective and interested parties to join its first call on the CAT on October 10, 2018. The final CAT industry member technical specification will be released on October 30, 2018.
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