Quant House Grows US Feeds, Ops

Within the coming weeks, the vendor will add feed handlers and data from the Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), the NYSE-Arca market of NYSE Euronext, and from fast-rising ECN Bats Trading, says Roxanne Pirooz, business development manager at Quant House in New York.

Later-possibly within three months-the vendor will also add the Opra feed of US options quote and trade data from the Options Price Reporting Authority. Pirooz says the reason for a delay in rolling out Opra is that "the most interest is around low latency, and Opra is a consolidated feed."

She says clients increasingly looking to trade international arbitrage strategies are demanding access to more venues because the vendor can provide access to US and European data, giving them "growth opportunities that they don't have with domestic-only carriers."

Stéphane Leroy, head of global sales and marketing at Quant House, says the vendor will first roll out feed handlers for the new venues, before adding them to QuantFeed. "To add them to QuantFeed, we have to install QuantFeed Handlers within each exchange, we have to buy dark fiber to interconnect those locations to our global data network, then distribute their data over our low-latency capabilities," Leroy says.

He says the Arca feed handler is already developed and in use in the SFTI (Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure) facility that the vendor already uses to source data from the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, though the vendor would still need to design additional network paths to carry the data, order and implement networking equipment and test the resiliency of the data connection.

Meanwhile, connectivity to ICE is being made easier by the fact that the exchange recently moved its matching engine from Atlanta to a datacenter in Chicago run by Equinix, where Quant House already hosts technology to provide data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade.

In fact, the vendor is planning to open a Chicago sales office this year, since its US client base is mostly split between the city and New York. Quant House already has three customer-facing staff in New York, though Leroy says he expects overall US staff numbers to grow to eight or 10 people over the next three years.