Pete’s Blog: A Night At The OPRA Maybe Ain’t So Bad
Please excuse the headline … I wanted to be cute and grab some attention. When it comes to market data rates, OPRA - the Options Price Reporting Authority - makes the headlines that low latency vendors (and industry analysts) love to cite - because the numbers are so frighteningly big. The reality, though, is a bit different.
OPRA routinely publishes predictions of potential message volume on its datafeed services, basing its figures on those provided by the markets that make up OPRA. One of its predictions - made in July 2007 - was that message rates might peak at 701,000 messages per second in January. Indeed, SIAC - which runs the computer systems for OPRA - can pump out data at that rate if it needed to.
In fact, as reported by my friends at FIF, the peak message rate in January (measured over a one minute period) was actually 345,252 mps - a record high for sure, but about half of the prediction of what might have happened.
No one (well, I’m not) is suggesting that handling OPRA rates is easy. But maybe it’s not as bad as it might be - if those predictions were closer to the reality. Also, maybe, those vendors want to keep those headline figures prominent to boost demand for their offerings. OPRA recently predicted peak rates might hit 801,000 mps in March and 907,000 mps for July. How scared should you be?
Until next time … here’s some great music.
Technorati Tags: opra, fif, siac, data volumes, message volumes
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 am
not a bad point, pete. perhaps it would be a worthwhile exercise for someone (us?) to map past reality to past forecasts. then someone could invent a derivative based on the disparity and could sell it as a hedge….