Feed Problem Halts Trading on OneChicago

Trading in single-stock futures on the OneChicago platform was halted for 81 minutes on Tuesday, Jan. 14 due to a problem with the CBOEdirect Relay datafeed, a spokesperson confirms. The feed covers the underlying "cash" equities market upon which futures prices are based.

"For some reason data came in intermittently, causing delays," the spokesperson says. "The [Lead Market Makers] who keep spreads tight based on the cash markets were pricing the futures on delayed prices, resulting in a a bad quote from only a few providers."

Lead Market Makers, or "liquidity providers," at OneChicago have access to numerous commercial data vendors as well as the Relay, which connects directly with the Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC) feed from US equity exchanges. Only a "handful" of users rely exclusively on the Relay for pricing, but they represented enough of the available liquidity that OneChicago determined that the market would be unevenly pitched toward those users who were able to get real-time prices vs. those who were experiencing delays, the spokesperson says.

The OneChicago platform is built on the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s CBOEdirect trading platform. The problem was with CBOE internal systems, not the SIAC feed, the spokesperson says, and was resolved by Thursday, Jan. 16.

No trades were canceled, and there were no trade breaks.

OneChicago had problems last fall during testing when bid prices did not always adjust to changing ask prices.