It also implies a few other things: more fragmentation of liquidity, larger trading and market data infrastructures, and greater importance placed on technology that can help participants navigate the growing landscape. In such an environment, consolidated market data sources will become a crucial component of the trading infrastructure. Even firms that currently depend on taking direct market data feeds might find that the escalating costs of trading infrastructure force them to consider alternatives.

In this scenario, Filtered Options Feed adds value by subtracting, or rather filtering OPRA data. Many firms mitigate the data they consume through the use of simple time conflation. These firms throw data on the floor based solely on the time that data arrived. Filtered Options Feed allows market data recipients to filter the data they receive more intelligently, by the nature of the data itself.

Market data can be filtered according to changes in price level (percent change in quoted price) and/or by changes to participation volume (percent or discreet amount change). So a firm could determine that it only wants to receive updates when the Best Bid/Offer changes by 5 percent.

Because the filters can be layered, that same firm could also implement a filter that will only publish updates to the book if the volume at the BBO changes by 10 percent. Those filters can by implemented individually or in combination. Filtered Options Feed can also execute two flavors of time conflation, if that suits their needs.

These filtering parameters allow firms to tailor the data they receive to satisfy their strategy.

And while those capabilities alone add considerable value, firms get the extra bang-for-the-buck with Filtered Options Feed because it is a hosted market data service. The filtering mechanism sits in NYSE Euronext’s Mahwah data center and sifts the data before it hits client networks and infrastructures, allowing these firms to save on the considerable downstream bandwidth and computing power necessary to process the huge data burden discussed above. Depending on the filter settings, firms can easily consume a consolidated options feed with far less than 1 gpbs of bandwidth and 4 to 8 cores of CPU power (down from a potential 48).

That’s a big savings in a world where everyone in the trading community is more cost conscious than ever.