Colo less of a problem than the right feed service. I can borrow unused colocation capacity from a friend for a short fee, but what I can't do is get access to the market data I need for the right price. Basically, finding a low latency version of IQFeed is the big problem. In fact, if DTN doubled their price but distributed their feed from NJ instead of Nebraska, I'd be the first customer in line.
Have you looked into Activetick (similar to IQfeed but not sure where their servers are). As far as location, I am evaluating commercialnetworkservices ... in the 100 William St. data center, just a few blocks from the exchanges. Hokey web site, but from what I can find, they are a very serious provider. Currently I use AutomatedVPS, one of the many providers right over the water in the Secaucus, NJ data center. They used to be very good but the past few months I have been having short outages happen 2-3 times a week. Frustrating.
Nanex NxCore has servers in NJ. 25ms precision on their time stamps. I'd get in touch with WinstonTJ... He can get you what you want.
I had some problems with ActiveTick. I sent their support some e-mails, didn't get an answer in a reasonable amount of time, and so I gave up on them. Other people claim to have had better luck, but I do not think this is the product for me.
Apparently, WinstonTJ is the man. What are people paying for NxCore? There's another thread on the forum about this, where they say $1000 setup, +$1800/mo for equities. But in that thread, they mention options.
Options are brutal - I think the OPRA NxTape is 25+ gigabyte per day If you leave those out, it gets a LOT smaller
Clearinghouse, on your time scale (tenths of a second), you're talking HFT. How are you able to pull this off via a retail broker? IQ is the best retail feed as far as I know.
I don't use a retail broker, although you could consider my setup not much better than a retail broker. I still, however, use IQFeed because the data it provides is more than my execution platform provides, or any other feed components that I've seen. IQ has the best value for the dollar in terms of features. I'm just looking for a less latent jumping point that fills the $300-$600/month market niche -- may not exist, but figured I'd ask anyway.
I did a lot of research on this topic, and tried a lot of different approaches, but I haven't found a satisfactory solution. I looked at NxCore. It is a fantastic product, but its fatal flaw is that NxCore does not distribute their data from the east coast, so there's a penalty involved of at least 24+ ms or so reacting from their market data. Is there anything in the sub-2k range that'll deliver market data for top of book + trades (serialized properly) to New Jersey from New Jersey, or New York? I guess I'm trying to do ghetto-grade HFT, but don't want to chain myself to an HFT firm or go to a real non-arcade prop firm where the PnL split is stacked more heavily towards the firm. Not to mention (from experience), sometimes even prop firms don't handle their market data in the most ideal way possible, which causes you to spend months engineering around quirks in how they process messages. There's this huge void between NxCore and "institutional grade expensiva bonanza", where it's not about microseconds but a few milliseconds, but not more than 20ms. What I need is an "IQFeed Pro"; something that is as reliable and clean as IQFeed, but just lower latency. I'd be willing to pay many multiples of the IQFeed cost for the functionality of IQFeed with lower latency. IQFeed handles a lot of my trades perfectly, except in fast markets. I just want to kill this one achilles heel.
What instruments are you trading? Are you trying to arb the differential between exchanges? Doesn't really matter who your aggregator is... The data you are receiving is 25ms old. OPRA has in their contract data can not be delivered before them. Opra collects aggregates and publishes data / aka NBBO and MM option quotes. If you want to do this low latency cross exchange arb all you need to do is colocate feed and order handlers at each venue and sync them out of band. You lose your edge as soon as you try to backhaul the feed. Sponsored DMA Access is readily available for JBO accounts. You can easily gauge and monitor your time advantage comparing your ticks against OPRA.