2012 Review: Emerging Exchanges Revamp Data Tech, US Exchanges Ditch FAST

Traders hunted for opportunities in new markets during 2012, prompting emerging exchanges to upgrade their technological infrastructures and roll out new feeds that meet latency requirements and simplify data access, in a bid to capture some of this business, while their Western counterparts began phasing out use of  the FIX/FAST Protocol as a data compression standard over concerns about potential exposure to a patent infringement lawsuit filed in the US by IXO/Realtime Data against US exchanges, consumers and data vendors.

The Australian Securities Exchange continued to grow its low-latency data offerings, expanding its ITCH-based feed of equity and options market data to distribute data from its main TradeMatch market (IMD, April 16), following an initial launch in 2011 to distribute data from its PureMatch venue of the 200 most liquid listed securities and exchange-traded funds. In February, ASX moved its primary equity and futures matching engines to its brand-new co-location facility.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange migrated its equities market to a new matching engine and data platform from London Stock Exchange subsidiary MillenniumIT in July, launching new feeds based on the ITCH and FIX/FAST protocols, and is now considering its options for upgrading its derivatives market (IMD, Oct. 22), along with the possibility of deploying a group ticker plant for collecting, normalizing and distributing JSE data, to make it easier for global clients to access the exchange’s data.

The Stock Exchange of Thailand also rolled out a new market data system for its equities market in September, and plans to migrate its derivatives data to the new system by the end of 2013, as part of its SET IT Master Plan to enhance its data and trading technology (IMD, Sept. 17), while Dalian Futures Information Technology, the technology arm of China’s Dalian Commodity Exchange, launched a Level 2 datafeed to meet growing demand among risk managers, data analysts and algorithmic traders (IMD, Oct. 9).

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing began an initiative to overhaul its technology and launch a new data distribution platform—the HKEx Orion Market Data (OMD) Platform, based on NYSE Technologies’ Exchange Data Publisher (IMD, April 16)—which will start distributing HKEx’s equities and index data in the second quarter of 2013 before expanding to derivatives data the following year.

HKEx originally planned to offer feeds based on a binary message protocol as well as FIX/FAST, but later decided not to include a FIX/FAST version due to the growing number of exchanges discontinuing their use of FIX/FAST (IMD, Nov. 29; May 21). While notices sent to customers from OPRA and CME Group cited the availability of high-bandwidth networks reducing the need for data compression, it became clear that the moves to phase out FIX/FAST are a direct response to patent infringement lawsuits filed by IXO/Realtime Data—which were since dismissed, though IXO is appealing the decision—to avoid potential exposure to litigation.