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

Time Stamps Key To Market Data Performance, TCA Provider Tells Webinar

Subscribe to our newsletter

To get the highest performance possible from managing market data operations, especially connectivity, a deterministic approach may not be the only one that should be taken, observed Louis Lovas, director of solutions at OneMarketData, who spoke in a December 8 webinar sponsored by the transaction cost analysis provider, and hosted by Intelligent Trading Technology and A-Team Group.

“If you consider from the consuming applications for data that data quality not only includes the idea of determinate behavior, but also elements that are more natural to the applications for firms that are trading across markets, that’s where you want the consistency in symbols and symbol continuity across market centers,” Lovas said.

Separating the parts of a transaction can affect how data consumers get information about that transaction, observed Mark Reece, director of professional services at MCO Europe, a financial data processing technology provider. “Depending on what you’re trying to do, you may impact the latency of your whole market data system,” he said. “Trades might impact or orders might be impacted by bursts of arrivals of market data. Similarly, if you’re a high-frequency market maker who is doing moving in futures and options, a single ticket underlying may result in a firestorm of outgoing quote updates from you. So you need to be very careful about separating those parts.”

Latency goals in relation to market data operations performance can vary, according to Ted Hruzd, senior infrastructure architect at RBC. “The goals of prop traders, market makers, high-frequency traders and arbitragers are much more latency sensitive,” he said. “Equities and futures traders are more apt to opt for ultra-low-latency. FX is lagging behind bond and commodity trading, but there have been some recent advances in electronic trading for corporate bonds.”

To best support transaction cost analysis or market impact analysis, time-stamp precision and synchronization is “vital,” said Lovas, “particularly for cross-market price discovery, or consolidation or aggregation across markets.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: From 24/7 to Event-Driven: Engineering the Next-Generation Exchange Platform

What digital asset and prediction markets are teaching traditional exchanges about availability, agility and time-to-market. New market structures and regulatory changes are forcing exchange operators to rethink the foundations of their technology stacks. Digital asset exchanges, prediction markets and retail-driven platforms have normalised 24/7 trading, continuous availability and rapid product iteration. In contrast, many traditional...

BLOG

BMLL and Features Analytics Target Surveillance Benchmarking with Level 3 Order Book Data

BMLL and Features Analytics have partnered to develop new trade surveillance benchmarking and market integrity analytics built on reconstructed historical order book data, signalling a shift towards more measurable, performance-driven surveillance frameworks. Under the agreement, Features Analytics will build and commercialise surveillance benchmarking products on top of BMLL’s harmonised historical Level 3, 2 and 1...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026

AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied...