OneChicago Preps Migration off CBOE Feed Network

Until now, OneChicago has utilized the CBOEdirect trading platform and CBOE Financial Network─operated by CBOE, which, along with CME Group and the Chicago Board of Trade, originally set up OneChicago─to support its futures trading and data distribution needs, and ran the proprietary OCX.Bets platform for equity swaps and block-sized trades ("blocks") in single stock futures and exchange-future-for-physical (EFP) contracts. But last October, the exchange rolled out OCXdelta1, an in house-developed trading and reporting platform for blocks and EFPs, along with an accompanying proprietary ticker plant to disseminate data on these contracts, dubbed the OneChicago Ticker Plant (OCTP).

On Friday, Jan. 23, OneChicago will complete the migration of all products onto the OCXdelta1 platform, having gone live with blocks, EFP and weekly contracts at launch in October, when data for those products also went live on OCTP. At this point, data on all products will be available via the OneChicago Financial Network over a cross-connect in CenturyLink Technology Solutions' NJ2 datacenter in Weehawken, NJ, whereas CBOE currently disseminates OneChicago data from its presence in Equinix's NY4 datacenter in Secaucus, NJ.

Tom McCabe, chief operating officer of OneChicago, says the new matching platform─which the exchange spent more than a year developing, along with OCTP─represents the first time that all OneChicago-listed products have been traded on the same platform, potentially allowing participants to experiment in different liquidity pools and spot broader trading opportunities. "Previously, if you had access to the CBOEdirect platform, then you couldn't access block pools of liquidity [on OCX.Bets], and if you had access to the block liquidity, you didn't have access to our other markets," he says.

As part of the migration, any existing multicast feed clients will need to migrate to OneChicago's new OCTP data format, though the exchange will support the legacy CSM data format until Friday, June 19.

McCabe says the new format will allow the exchange to support more data fields that are important to its traded products─such as spread data for all products, and full data for EFP trades, rather than just the futures leg─and to enhance its datasets further in future.

"As an independent business, we have the desire to build, not buy [technology platforms]," he says. "We would rather build our own and put in support for features designed for our business─and we think we're the best people to do that."

The exchange will charge a $2,000 monthly connection fee for access to the feed's A and B multicast groups, plus a $500 monthly fee for each additional connection. However, McCabe says the move will have no impact on OneChicago's market data fees of $5 per user per month for Level 1 data and $10 per user per month for Level 2 market depth.