Reuters Expands RDF Sources, Readies Release of B-Pipe Handler

Reuters is set to release this week version 2.1 of Reuters Data Feed Direct with six new direct exchange venues, officials at the data vendor say.

Access to the Inet ECN, NYSE ARCA ECN, NQDS, Nasdaq OrderView, NYSE OpenBook, and Toronto Stock Exchange Level 1 data will all become available on the low latency direct datafeed.

Reuters expects the number of direct venues available to double by the end of June and aims to have 16 North American, 14 European and 12 Asian venues on RDF Direct by the end of 2006.

Separately, Reuters' feed handler for Bloomberg's B-Pipe datafeed, formerly known as "Phat Pipe," should be available by mid-year following beta tests (IMD, March 6).

Peter Moss, global head of Reuters' enterprise division, says the Reuters-built feed handler should be released at the same time that Bloomberg releases B-Pipe. Reuters believes this will happen early in the summer.

"We already have 70 to 80 feeds today from competitors, brokers or exchanges," Moss says. "The difference between the Bloomberg feed and other feeds resides in the semantic around the fields; it uses a different symbology."

Reuters is not the only company developing a feed handler bringing Bloom berg's data onto RMDS. Wombat Financial Software already has its own version of the feed handler, although it is still awaiting an official blessing from Reuters (IMD, March 20).

Reuters decided to develop its own Bloomberg feed handler because it "seemed like a fairly significant feed," says Moss. "We wanted to make sure that the data was supported in an adequate way and [could be] consumed easily."

While the event has been deemed newsworthy by Reuters, Moss says that the feedback from users has been low. "It is not as much as you would think," he says. "[The feed handler] is not really a surprise.

"We believe the feed market is moving from consolidated feeds to a combination of consolidated feeds and direct feeds to provide the low latency for trading-based applications," Moss adds. "Our model is consolidated where you can plug in direct feeds using the same data models. We want to merge the feeds to form a datafeed family. This will allow for a broadening out of the data type available."

Bloomberg did not return numerous calls and e-mails for comment.