Redline Adds Aquis Feed to InRush Ticker, Expanding European Coverage

Redline has just released the new feed handler for Aquis' binary multicast feed, in response to demand from new and existing clients, after around two months of building and testing. "The feed handler was very straightforward.... A lot of the work was just getting connectivity and the credentials to do the work," says Redline chief executive Mark Skalabrin. The main challenges had more to do with market structure, such as the lack of standardized symbology, and the need for currency normalization where the same symbol is traded in different currencies on multiple exchanges.

The InRush ticker plant consolidates multiple direct feeds to create a user-defined best bid and offer in less than two microseconds. But because there is no securities information processor-generated consolidated feed in Europe, Redline needed to build a new way to compare prices against those of other markets, whereas in the US, it analyzes tick data from direct feeds against the SIP feeds to identify and scrub any differences.

"Europe is different from other markets, but we've designed out compositing layer to take the inputs it needs and create an EBBO that meets the needs of most people," Skalabrin says. "We would like nothing better than to provide an EBBO for Europe... but what we've done is allow people to connect to our software and build an EBBO from the pieces they need."

The vendor already offers feed handlers for equities feeds from markets operated by BATS Europe; the CEE Stock Exchange Group (including the Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague exchanges and Wiener Borse); Deutsche Borse; Euronext Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Paris; the Irish Stock Exchange; the London Stock Exchange, including Borsa Italiana and Turquoise; Oslo Bors; the SIX Swiss Exchange; and Nasdaq OMX's Nordic and Baltic markets.

"We have the core European markets done and deployed, but there are probably around 10 other feeds that we haven't completed yet. Aquis was probably the most important of those... because it trades symbols listed on the LSE, so is one of the key venues to get the best price. This brings us to more than 30 different trading venues in Europe," Skalabrin says, adding that the vendor further expand its coverage by rolling out another handful of venues over the next six months.