The Benefits of Direct Feeds
Although InfoDyne’s ticker plant technology supports the incorporation of the major Consolidated Feeds you’ve come to know, but not necessarily love, one of our competitive strengths lies in leveraging Direct Feeds with your own ticker plant solution: TPS+Plus. The obvious benefits of implementing Direct Feeds are four-fold:
- Low Latency – receive updates from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds faster
- Lower Cost – middleman and his cost eliminated
- Minimal Lead Time to Implementation – off-the-shelf solutions available from InfoDyne
- Increased Flexibility – several integration options including compatibility with existing sites
The ticker plants of consolidated feed vendors divert exchange data to the vendor’s data center and through multiple networks, routers, and computers before it reaches the consumer. The resulting data latency, averaging several hundred milliseconds, is enormous if the consumer is a trading application.
Compounding this problem is the introduction by many exchanges of new data feeds and services. In some cases, these new feeds are being patched into a ticker plant infrastructure that was designed in 1980’s and has already been heavily patched to accommodate the explosion in markets that occurred in the 1990’s.
Finally, in an effort to contain communications bandwidth some vendors have resorted to software-based data compression algorithms thereby introducing additional data latency; still others perform “tick mitigation,” which involves arbitrarily dropping some data records entirely and/or conflating updates.
The net effect of these issues is a widening gap between the performance requirements of program trading and the delivery characteristics of consolidated feeds.
In the past when combating these obstacles, the issue that prevented many firms from taking feeds directly from exchanges and other data originators was the substantial cost of developing and operating an in-house ticker plant. First there was the cost to develop all the software: feed handlers, data normalization, caching, distribution, interfaces. Then there was the ongoing cost of operation: monitoring systems, fault recovery, and continuous system enhancements to keep up with changes to feed specifications and ever-growing data volumes.
InfoDyne provides the advantages of Direct Feeds without all the cost and risk. Now you can have the advantages of Direct Feeds without the cost or headaches. InfoDyne
TPS+Plus: Ticker Plant Solutions provide all the functionality you need, at a fraction of the cost of building it yourself. What’s more, we provide a number of integration options to make it easy to integrate the data into your existing environment and into your trading applications, including the ability to integrate data directly into your Triarch®, RMDS®, or TIB® environment. As for the ongoing maintenance: leave it to us. We have several support and
Managed Services options available. We keep up with changes to feed specifications, increasing data rates, and technology advances, keeping your system at optimal operation level and up-to-date at all times.