Smorgasbord of products includes pricing and tick data, trade analytics, and reference data.

Exchanges are repackaging the information they produce into value-added products of structured data, including pricing and tick data, trade analytics, reference data and other commercially-sourced information.

TMX, for example, provides equity and derivative data feeds, historical reference and corporate actions data products, which are delivered according to pre-defined data/functional specifications.

“TMX Datalinx and its customers view structured data sets like pricing, timeseries/tick and reference data as mature data sets, which are defined, structured and managed using a variety of protocols and technologies,” Dominic Dowd, director of data delivery solutions at TMX Datalinx, told Markets Media. “Clients use a variety of in-house and third party vendor applications to process this structured data.”

Trade analytics data is one example of a highly structured data set.

“TMX Datalinx is evaluating several ways to enrich its proprietary equities and derivatives data at source,” Dowd said. “These range from standardizing common trade analytics data to combining our proprietary and third party data into unique cross-asset class data sets/analytics.”

In 2011, TMX Datalinx launched a new equity data feed product, TSX QuantumFeed for Level 1 and Level 2 data.
TSX QuantumFeed is the first phase of a broader roadmap to migrate all TMX equity and derivative data feeds to the common architecture of the Quantum Feed System to reduce complexity in the delivery architecture and increase the availability, reliability, resiliency and performance in TMX market data.

TMX Datalinx has developed new protocols such as the Extreme Message Transfer Protocol (XMTP) to more efficiently deliver structured market data to clients.

XMTP is in line with global standards for small fixed record length messages with binary format to reduced jitter for predictable access and lower bandwidth utilization for reduction in the total delivery cost: average message size is 70 bytes, recommended bandwidth is 35 MB, and 99% of all messages delivered are within 300% of the mean/average latency.

“Use of fixed record size formats, binary encoding and smaller message sizes with focused content sets has helped drive efficient delivery of data from source through to client applications and end users,” said Dowd.

On March 5, 2012, TMX Datalinx went live with an enhanced historical market data website to provide faster access to and delivery of online market data products and custom data queries, and an increase in historical quotes to 12 months from three months.

The complementary capabilities offered by Atrium and TMX Datalinx enable clients to benefit significantly from additional data content and from enhanced access to trading solutions.

“We have an ecosystem of providers that are supplying customers with historical and streaming data, plus analytics,” said Emmanuel Carjat, managing director of TMX Atrium. “When a customer comes on board, they get access to market data feeds, DMA and independent software vendors that can provide pre- and post-trade services, such as clearing.”

TMX Datalinx continues to expand the range of third party data provided to clients in an effort to make it more efficient for firms to trade its market and other markets globally.

This includes the provision of full Canadian real time equity trade and order information, foreign exchange and news, as well as North American and European information through our TMX Atrium network platform.