Exegy Inc., a leading provider of managed services and low-latency technology for market data normalization and distribution and the Financial Information Forum (FIF) announced today the relaunch of MarketDataPeaks.com which reports peak rates for real-time market data feeds from equities, futures, and options markets in the United States.

Originally released in 2008, MarketDataPeaks.com was the first public website to provide a real-time visualization of aggregated market data message rates across United States exchanges. The newly launched site provides FinTech professionals unique insight to inform operational awareness and capacity planning decisions. “MarketDataPeaks.com has proven to be an invaluable service to the financial industry, promoting the design and operation of robust electronic markets. We are delighted that Exegy has reinvested in this service to expand the breadth and quality of real-time operational data to the community,” says Kevin McCabe, Program Associate, FIF.

Recent regulatory mandates of capacity measurement and planning for electronic trading systems, including MIFiD II in Europe and Regulation SCI in the U.S., require capacity testing at market data rates higher than current peaks and market participants need these key data points to comply with evolving regulation. The new MarketDataPeaks.com builds upon a decade of technological advancements and aims to improve the accuracy and precision of rate measurements. Data rate measurements are performed by next-generation Exegy appliances that feature hardware-based timestamping, clock synchronization, and rate measurements. In addition to more accurate measurements, the new MarketDataPeaks.com provides measurements of micro-bursts of market data – the amount of data arriving in a one millisecond interval. “It is typical for burst rates to be ten times larger than data rates measured in a one second interval. This information is essential when designing systems that process real-time market data feeds without data loss and with minimal variance in processing latency,” says Exegy chief technology officer David Taylor.

The new MarketDataPeaks.com also provides a broader set of metrics including packet rates, in addition to message rates, for more accurate network capacity planning purposes. Previously the benchmark metric was messages per second which primarily determines the number of events per second that market data consumers must process. Packets per second helps determine the capacity required by network devices such as switches and the interface cards used by servers. “Commodity switches and network interface cards are typically designed to meet the needs of high volume markets like enterprise computing and cloud infrastructure. Financial market data emphasizes data latency over network efficiency, and therefore it demands that network infrastructure be able to transfer minimum-sized packets at the maximum rate supported by network links,” adds Taylor.

The public MarketDataPeaks.com site provides message rates, message burst rates, packet rates, and packet burst rates for two sets of U.S. market data feeds – the Securities Information Process (SIP) feeds and the proprietary (direct) feeds from the major equities and commodities exchanges. After registering with the site, users gain access to fine-grained control over the real-time displays with the ability to view metrics on an individual feed basis, as well as select any permutation of data feeds within each set. In addition to graphical plots of today’s market data rates, MarketDataPeaks.com provides historical peak rate information in tables.

MarketDataPeaks.com is driven by Exegy appliances located in the Equinix NY4 colocation facility. Exegy plans to relaunch MarketDataPeaks services for European, Canadian, and Asia Pacific equities and derivatives markets in the coming months. Exegy also plans to expand the current set of feeds in the MarketDataPeaks service, as well as add new asset classes, specifically global FX.

About Exegy, Inc.

Exegy provides best-of-breed technology and managed services for the normalization and distribution of real-time market data to a diverse set of elite firms in the financial services industry. Today Exegy serves as a strategic partner to leading exchange and ATS operators, market makers, sell-side banks, buy-side asset managers, and proprietary traders. At the heart of Exegy’s product line are purpose-built, hardware-accelerated appliances derived from an extensive portfolio of patented and patent-pending technology. For more information, please visit www.exegy.com and follow Exegy on LinkedIn and Twitter @ExegyMarketData.

About FIF

FIF was formed in 1996 to provide a centralized source of information on the implementation issues that impact the securities industry across the order lifecycle. Our participants include trading and back-office service bureaus, broker-dealers, market data vendors and exchanges. Through topic-oriented working groups, FIF participants focus on critical issues and productive solutions to technology developments, regulatory initiatives, and other industry changes.