Tick Data, the market data division of Nexa Technologies, Inc., have released TickStream, a low-latency, real-time market data feed and hosting solution for high-frequency traders of equities, futures, and options.
Nexa Technologies has maintained a ticker plant and data feed for over five years which has supported its direct market access (DMA) trading platforms. It has now engineered the data feed into a new standalone offering that is one of the first of its kind that offers high-frequency traders an aggregated feed solution with near-direct connection performance at a fraction of the price.
“Until now, many hedge funds and algorithmic trading firms have been priced out of the low-latency data market due to the high costs of direct connections and demanding hardware and software requirements,” said Eric Stoop, president of Nexa Technologies. “In addition, since each exchange and ECN has a proprietary data format that changes regularly, these firms have needed to employ a staff of programmers to write and maintain feed handlers or license feed handlers from other providers.”
A client that hosts its trading server in the Nexa data center is connected to the ticker plant by a few feet of cable, removing geographical latency. All aspects of the ticker plant and exchange connections are redundant and cross-connected with Nexa’s data recovery (DR) site in Texas. TickStream’s ticker plant receives raw data directly from the exchanges and ECNs, immediately aggregates it into an ASCII stream, and rebroadcasts it to clients via a UDP (User Datagram Protocol) multicast. The system is fast, secure, and fully redundant.
“We designed TickStream as a ‘buy-alternative’ to the costly effort of building and maintaining low-latency direct exchange connections,” Neal Falkenberry, SVP Tick Data Division, Nexa Technologies, Inc. “By hosting their trading models securely in our data center, in close proximity to our ticker plant and FIX gateway, clients can achieve speeds within milliseconds of a direct connection from an aggregated data and connectivity solution.”