Best Low-Latency Data/Technology Provider: Pico Quantitative Trading

As trading companies seek faster routes to market and quicker access to market data, technology providers are responding by advancing their networks and infrastructure. The award for Best Low-Latency Data/Technology Provider goes to Pico for its ultra-low-latency direct connectivity to major exchanges and its ever-expanding datacenter presence.

Low-latency connectivity to exchange market data can be costly and technically complex. It requires datacenter presence and, historically, a multilayer network infrastructure that adds additional latency. Pico offers a single-hop solution where clients can connect trading servers through a collapsed architecture via a single co-located Pico switch, receiving market data and sending orders at the lowest possible latency. Pico delivers this service as an outsourced solution, leveraging its expansive network, exchange and market data connectivity services, and its application management services in the cloud. 

The company acts as a service provider and a licensed market data vendor of record, sourcing raw market data directly from a venue’s lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth handoffs and delivers it over a low-latency, fault-tolerant fiber-optic network. 

By using the single-hop solution—currently available at datacenters in Basildon (ICE) in the UK, Frankfurt (Eurex/Xetra) and CH1 (ICE) in Chicago—clients are able to access these markets in approximately 380 nanoseconds, significantly faster than the near-microsecond round-trip times of standard architecture. 

Over the coming months, Pico plans to enhance the solution’s performance by using new layer 1 switches. “We are also looking to extend the solution to other markets, and there are certainly opportunities in the Asian markets that we are expanding into,” says Tim Williams, Pico’s director of product.

Pico is located in 31 datacenters globally, covering more than 200 exchanges and trading venues across the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region (Apac), and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Over the past year, it has increased its datacenter presence in Apac, which has enabled it to onboard and support clients that want to include the Asian markets in their global trading strategies. Over the next 18 months, Pico plans to add 20 more datacenters in countries including China, Australia, South Korea and India. 

“For clients who want to start trading certain markets, coming on board with Pico gives them direct access to the ecosystem that we provide and easy access into trading markets that they don’t have access to today,” says Michael Verkuijl, Pico’s global head of sales.

The company sets clients up quickly through the use of automated processes to enhance implementation tasks, and has dedicated teams to complete builds and changes, which reduces operational overheads for clients, he says. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners