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

Upcoming Webinar: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Date: 17 March 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of...

BLOG

Data Automator Xceptor Offers Platform Ready-Made for AI

Dan Reid is not surprised that Xceptor, the data automation giant he formed two decades ago, finds itself at the vanguard of a change in the way financial institutions regard and use documents. The rapid and accurate parsing of information from paper- and PDF-based reports has been made possible thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence. The volume...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Spring, New York, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 8th year, the Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference managed by A-Team Group, is the premier content forum and networking event for investment firms and hedge funds.

GUIDE

Putting the LEI into Practice

Hundreds of thousands of pre-Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) have been issued by pre-Local Operating Units (LOUs) in the Global LEI System (GLEIS), and the standard entity identifier has been mandated for use by regulators in both the US and Europe. As more pre-LEIs are issued ahead of the establishment of the global systems’ Central Operating...