NYSE to ‘Align' Amex, Arca Feeds

Amex previously had only an event-driven feed, and did not offer an aggregated option, says Ron Jordan, executive vice president of data services at NYSE. The additional feed option will enable latency-sensitive clients to receive a high-bandwidth feed of unfiltered Amex data, while also offering clients struggling with increasing volumes the option of a low-bandwidth, aggregated feed.

Most Amex-listed exchange-traded funds have already migrated to NYSE's Arca market,though Amex's options trading will not migrate until February.

The exchange is pursuing a similar strategy with its ArcaBook feed from the NYSE Arca market-to address spikes in volume and rising bandwidth requirements for the ArcaBook feed-by creating two new Arca feeds in the form of Arca OpenBook Ultra and Arca OpenBook Real-Time.

For example, NYSE's OpenBook Real-Time consumes only around one-fifteenth the amount of bandwidth as OpenBook Ultra. "The difference is the frequency-every event versus one update per second, where bandwidth is much lower.... We believe there is need for an event-based product for Level 2 data, whether it is ArcaBook Ultra or OpenBook Ultra," Jordan says.

NYSE will roll out the new delivery options for ArcaBook next year, he adds.

The move is part of a larger project across NYSE Euronext to standardize data products as the exchange group moves to a new Universal Trading Platform, Jordan says.

"In 2009 we will start to roll out more global solutions, and market data is no exception," he says. "Our intention is to align around formats and delivery... and the same concept will apply to all proprietary datafeeds, including Level 1, top-of-book data."

The feeds will also standardize on NYSE's internal feed format, known internally as PDP (Proprietary Data Products format)-whereas the format for NYSE and Amex feeds were previously very different-enabling vendors to connect to data from multiple markets using virtually the same feed format. "If a vendor has already coded to OpenBook, adding Amex will be only a small incremental effort," Jordan says.

"We'll continue to update our formats in 2009, and to make improvements based on what our customers need and how quickly we can get it to them. This will include Euronext markets... and we want to make it as easy as possible to consume our data while improving reliability, recoverability and operability," he says.