Earlier this week, the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) delayed the go live date for doubling the data streams of its consolidated tape for equity options, following requests from the market for more time.
OPRA previously confirmed that it was expanding its data dissemination from a 48-line to a 96-line multicast data distribution network in a move aimed at optimal symbol balancing and line capacity utilisation.
OPRA’s subscribers have now requested additional test time, which the authority has granted, with the go live now set for 5 February 2024, as opposed to the previously confirmed 5 October 2023.
It has also been confirmed that the next capacity test will be carried out 18 November this year, before a functional test and capacity test on 20 January 2024, three weeks before the go live.
As the authority plans to scale the capacity of its distribution, the market is preparing for the significant change and putting in place measures to consume around 120 million messages a second following the go live.
Speaking to The TRADE, David Taylor, chief executive of trading infrastructure provider, Exegy, explained: “That’s an enormous amount of data. As a firm who acquired a company that previously ran a traditional software implementation of a ticker plant to consume that feed, we know that it can take a dozen, two dozen, maybe more servers to consume that data with software and current market participants are looking at doubling the amount of hardware they need to deploy in order to consume that data.”
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Exegy recently announced its sixth generation ticker plant which is purpose-built for processing this options market data, processing the OPRA feed on a single 2U server and providing an immediate two times latency reduction (when compared to the previous fifth generation).
Specifically, the changes being made by OPRA: “Help facilitate capacity upgrades to the ICE Global Network (IGN), new subnets, rendezvous points, source addresses, and multicast addresses are being introduced (including Global Trading Hours).”
The process is split into two phases, with the migration of the current 48-line symbol distribution schema to new network subnets, rendezvous points, source addresses, and multicast addresses coming first, before phase two wherein migration of the new symbol distribution schema over 96 lines will happen.
In terms of how prepared the market is for such a move, Taylor told The TRADE: “I think most firms are prepared or preparing as well as they can. There was recently a capacity test by the consolidated tape […] they approached that 120 million message per second level of performance.
“[…] the industry has been vocal and in fact this change has been delayed a few times just to give the industry the ability to be ready and I think that’s a very important point – that this issue of capacity and the ability to handle the data is an important market stability issue so we view our efforts to provide these very efficient, high capacity systems as our contribution to having stable, reliable markets.”
As a securities information processor, OPRA members consist of the national securities exchanges that have been approved by the SEC to provide markets for the listing and trading of exchange-traded securities options.