Low-Latency.com

So, those party animals at ACTIV Financial have invited me to a little gathering tonight - at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square - to formally launch ActivFeed MPU, their new hardware-accelerated feed handling software.  It should be an great event, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about the black art of programming FPGAs (that’s Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - an emerging technology that could have a huge impact on low latency systems.
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With most things in life, the devil is surely in the detail. Baby packed and ready to go, car loaded and full of gas, route planned and maps in the front seat: where are the car keys?

And when all the big hoo-ha’s at the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have mulled and remulled the logic of Thomson’s bid to acquire Reuters (although it’s looking more like a reverse from where we’re sitting – just back from France, of course, so completely off the map), it’s going to be the in the detail where things start to get scratchy. For our very very vertical world of low-latency market data delivery infrastructures, that means: what happens about Thomson’s recent deal with Wombat Financial?
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The one constant in the world of financial markets IT is that nothing stays the same for very long. The world of market data feeds and the applications that process them is no exception.

As data rates increase, and as processing systems (or any component of them) are upgraded and modified, performance can be hit. The trick is to constantly monitor the environment to pre-empt potential problems. But what should one monitor?
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In his blog last week, Andrew said he’s skeptical that advantages from investing in low latency infrastructure will be anything other than short lived.

I tend to share his opinion that low latency is passing through, though I am less of a skeptic (Andrew’s turning French). To me, the current focus on low latency is simply the way that Wall Street works, such that it does. There’s an opportunity to be had – to rise above the crowd, to make money – and so the top tier of the financial markets are all over it, doing just that (or at least they think they are).
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As prime suspects in the worldwide conspiracy that is low latency, you’d think we might be protagonists too. But while whatever low latency is helps those who’ve achieved it to beat the competition that haven’t (yet), I’m still sceptical that any advantage derived from ‘low latency’ will be short-lived. How can it not be? After all, as vendor after vendor and firm after firm heralds the arrival of yet faster access to electronic trading systems or delivery of real-time market data, at some point the “Scottie” factor surely will kick in.
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Q: When is a datafeed not a datafeed? A: When it’s a datafeed handler. When we were compiling our wonderful report Faster Than A Speeding Bullet: Low Latency Architectures And Building Blocks For Tomorrow’s Trading Applications, we included profiles of vendors who sell datafeed handlers. At first, we left out Reuters Data Feed Direct because we had it marked as a datafeed itself, but – upon further investigation – we decided we had to include it. For Reuters Data Feed Direct is perhaps more a datafeed handler than it is a datafeed itself.
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