Chicago - where the Big Data grows

Interesting figures. Thanks for sharing. Taking off from your last line, though, I'd have thought that the growing trend of colocation during the same period would've had the opposite effect on bandwidth. After all, if a bank's trading servers were placed on the exchange's LAN to cater to HFT / low latency trading, it shouldn't need as much WAN bandwidth between its premises and that of the exchange as it did in the pre-colocation era. Maybe your figures have already factored that but I was just wondering...

Chicago has multiple exchanges, so being co-located in one exchange doesn't get you co-located in all of them and, on its own, doesn't get you lowest-latency access to all of the Chicago exchanges. OPRA is the market data feed - not the trading system for each exchange - and is a separate agency, so firms that want to trade have to take account of all of those factors when they develop their trading architecture (for investment firms) and/or their architecture for market data aggregation (because this also applies to data vendors around the world).  And today OPRA includes more than just Chicago.  Hope this clarifies.

Yes, it clarifies. Thanks.

WHERE IS THE OFF RAMP ON THE “SPEED and SPEND” HIGHWAY

It would seem that taken to its logical conclusion the “industry”
would continue to spend huge amounts of money speeding up its acquisition and access to market, order, trade and execution data. I wonder for what purpose?

Surely each firm’s increment of speed or data acquisition
advantage is met with another’s step up in spend rate to one-up and gain temporary advantage.  This speed and spend frenzy is overlaid on VERY important capital and contract market infrastructure that is the life blood of the global economy. The transactions that flow through its communication pipes and computers allow capital to seek its best uses while supporting the techniques of risk management that is supposed to mitigate the risk of each transaction and/or a portfolio of such transactions.

It seems to me that as an industry we are failing to understand
that it is mainly our customers that pay for the costs of maintaining the speed and spend highway. We will surely lose their trust when the whole thing goes “pop” AGAIN. Then where are we?

Let’s get real, get our “industry” leadership to get us to a better place before the regulators take us AGAIN to the woodshed, perhaps this time to permanent purgatory!