The company has offices in NY and Chicago and their web-site is www.spryware.com. I think Terranova might use them as a data feed. Wondering if an individual trader can subscribe or afford to subscribe to their data feed?
no basis for this, but if I had to guess I would say 100k start-up and 5-10k / month for colo / data.
I'm just your avg retail trader, but I'll take a stab at explaining this to the best of my knowledge. From their website, thier main product seems to be MIS- market information server. This is what is known as a feed handler. This takes the raw feed from different exchanges, likely each in its own format, cleans it, checks it, puts it in a standard format and either outputs it to an autotrading system or saves it or both. It said somewhere on their site that they can provide the feed, you can provide the feed, your broker maybe, etc. Point is the feed and handler are available seperately and feeds direct from the exchange are not cheap. Neither is the handler or the proper hardware / infrastructure. colo = co-location, meaning housing your server at their facility located at the exchange in most cases with a fibre connection. Your system runs there and you remote in to admin. Geographical latency = 0. The protocol they are using for data is FAST, a FIX dirivative adapted for data instead of order entry. FIX is a very reliable messaging protocol but I've heard bloated for data delivery. FAST addresses those problems but is very new. So this is not a retail level product. As far as finding a broker using it, best place to ask is their website. i would guess many brokers would consider the workings / providers of the back end of their trading platforms proprietary info, but they may be able to point you in the right direction. From most everything I've read / heard, these are the technologies you want to look at if you are interested in the sub-second arena. I would think properly implemented this would be a high quality feed to get access through a broker. Zenfire comes to mind here, no idea if its based on this but its likely something close adapted for retail. so broker sending adaptation of this feed to clients = better than avg broker. Hosting your server at broker close to exchange = better than above. Hosting your server at exchange with exchange direct feed likely as exchange member with clearing agreement= no latency, no margin check, very low commissions. Fully custom ATS that can get, process, react to every tick, every order book change multiple times in between your .3 second interactive brokers data refresh. gives new meaning to the term real time data and can be both a lucrative and expensive game to play, but try to play without the right equipment and you'll get you're ass kicked.