Exegy Boosts Options, Canada Handlers

St. Louis, Mo.-based hardware ticker plant provider Exegy has expanded its suite of feed handlers for US equity options data, in response to overall options market growth and requests for low-latency options feeds with greater depth, as well as data from alternative trading venues in Canada, distributed via the TMX Information Processor’s Consolidated Data Feed, to meet demand for enterprise-level deals among local trading firms.

The vendor last month released production feed handlers for all the feeds available from the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s CSM (CBOE Streaming Markets) direct feeds service—which includes real-time quote and trade data from CBOE, the CBOE Stock Exchange and C2 Options Exchange—as well as beta versions of feed handlers for processing data from Nasdaq OMX’s BX Options and PHLX Depth of Market feeds.

An Exegy spokesperson says demand for access to the options feeds is coming from traders, banks, broker-dealers and market makers, driven by increasing automation and growth in trading volumes in US options, as well as in the number of marketplaces, as participants await the launches of MIAX Options and a second options exchange from the International Securities Exchange. In addition, the ability to obtain greater market depth via direct feeds and to receive data faster than via the Options Price Reporting Authority’s consolidated feed of US options quote and trade data is appealing to options traders, the spokesperson adds.

“The market has attracted more institutional investors,” the spokesperson says. “Pension funds and their trustees, as well as other responsible investors, appreciate that they can both enhance their returns through careful options management and control their risks in these extraordinary times.”

Exegy has also released production versions of feed handlers for the Consolidated Last Sale datafeeds for the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange, as well as data from Chi-X Canada, Omega ATS and Liquidnet Canada, as distributed via the TMX Information Processor, which normalizes the feeds to the TSX’s proprietary STAMP protocol. Exegy already provides feed handlers for processing direct feeds from Canadian venues.

The spokesperson says that while Exegy previously targeted Canadian proprietary trading firms, which tend to focus on the lowest-latency direct feeds from the most liquid markets, it has recently been securing more enterprise-level deals with large Canadian banks, which require visibility across all available Canadian data, rather than only low-latency direct feeds.