Quincy Prescribes LD4 Co-Lo for CME Data

Oakland, Calif.-based low-latency market data connectivity provider Quincy Data has established a UK point of presence in Equinix's LD4 datacenter in Slough, outside London, to provide high-frequency traders and other firms co-located in LD4 with low-latency market data from CME Group.

Quincy can deliver data from CME's markets to LD4 in 36.4 milliseconds via its Quincy Extreme Data (QED) service, leveraging microwave connectivity from Quincy's sister company McKay Brothers between CME's Aurora, Ill. datacenter to Equinix's NY4 facility in Secaucus, NJ, and undersea fiber connectivity from network provider Level 3 to connect from NY4 to LD4. The one-way latency figure is significantly faster than fiber-only based connectivity, officials say.

To minimize latency, Quincy is not carrying CME's full datafeed, but is rather sending a sub-set of futures data to LD4 from CME's four main markets -- the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, NYMEX and COMEX -- covering energy futures, equity futures, foreign exchange futures, metal futures and treasury bond futures.

"CME Group generates a ton of data, so we choose the relevant bits of data that high-frequency traders really rely on, like E-Mini S&P index futures contracts, treasury futures -- things that are real market movers and have a lot of volume," say Stéphane Tyc, Paris-based co-founder of Quincy Data. "We only transfer those because if you transfer everything you clog up pipes and incur buffering delays, which we want to avoid at all costs," Tyc says.

Quincy originally launched the service in December but previously only made it available to US-based firms seeking CME and Nasdaq data. Now, the vendor's decision to bring the service to LD4 is in response to demand from European traders and risk managers.

"FX in particular is an important asset class that more and more people are interested in, in Europe," Tyc says. "So... we carry FX and treasury bond futures, which are important for firms executing European bond future correlation trades. In addition, we carry some gold and oil futures. Those are of interest to trade not just in London but in Moscow, Dubai, and even Mumbai," he adds.

Though the majority of firms using microwave connectivity today are large high-frequency trading firms with the resources to acquire large amounts of bandwidth, any latency-sensitive trading firm -- including smaller firms that were previously priced out of the ultra-low latency market -- should be interested in microwave connectivity, Tyc says. "Now, [small firms] can buy CME data in LD4 for less than $15,000 a month, which is a price point which many more firms can afford," he says.

Quincy went live in LD4 last week, and is already looking to expand its European network, Tyc says, though he declines to provide further details.