Market data firm Markit plans to reduce the delay on free data from its BOAT European over-the-counter equities trade reporting and data service to 15 minutes from 1 June.
Free Markit BOAT data is currently available two hours after the trade is published to the service. Users requiring real time data are charged a fee.
The reduced delay will bring Markit BOAT into line with general market practices. The free market data available on portals such as Yahoo and the websites of multilateral trading facilities is typically delayed by 15 minutes.
The planned change comes amid calls for cheaper market data to help create a cost-effective consolidated post-trade data source for Europe. A white paper on European data consolidation published by data vendor Thomson Reuters in January, based on interviews with the buy-side, noted that because of exchanges’ tendency to charge a bundled rate for pre- and post-trade data, coupled with the incremental cost of OTC trade reporting facilities such as BOAT, the buy-side consider the current cost of creating a consolidated tape to be too high.
Thomson Reuters suggested in the paper that a revision of MiFID should ensure that execution and trade publication venues make their data available for inclusion in a consolidated tape “at a much lower price than is currently the case, ideally at marginal cost”.
“The emergence of a consolidated tape in Europe can only be made possible if all data publication venues work together to harmonise their practices, be they time delays or trade flags,” said Niall Cameron, executive vice president of Markit, in a statement. “It is in that spirit that we have decided to make our delayed data available to market participants on a free of charge basis 15 minutes after the trade is published on Markit BOAT.”
Markit BOAT has already moved to reduce its charges. From 1 January it cut the fee for real-time, pan-European data to €40 a month from €120.
In May last year it introduced a new fee structure, which allowed users to buy data from specific countries or regions rather than incurring the cost of a full pan-European feed.