The Application Latency Indicator for Vendors and Exchanges (ALIVE) product is a data monitoring and quality tool used to identify discrepancies in a data provider’s content. West Highland makes sure the client’s delivery is received in an expected timeframe and an expected interval. The role of West Highland is to look for deviations, anomalies and delays.
ALIVE is either deployed as a standalone tool or as part of a value added service to an existing West Highland support agreement. West Highland support staff manages the infrastructure, manages installs, and monitors the overall market data process. This offering ensures optimum performance and competitiveness for the client.
Service based monitoring of Data Quality / Latency
Maps & monitors data latency by vendor/exchange
Compares multiple vendors simultaneously
Historically tracks best times by vendor / time
Tracks total circuit from exchange to local application time
Helps support regulator requirements for ensuring best data to clients
Identifies consistent delivery of data
Presents holistic view of performance across vendors
Shows any patterns for increased or decreased delivery times throughout the trading day
Substantiates firms position of presenting clients with best / most accurate data at any given time
Historical / trend information supports risk/compliance objectives
Correlates volume spikes to latency spikes across different vendors and exchanges
Compliance directives and SEC regulations keep firms under increased scrutiny to ensure their clients are receiving the best data available.
Intransient to Market Data is “built in latency” which firms accept — when they know what it is.
With West Highland’s Application Latency Indicator for Vendors and Exchanges (ALIVE) service, firms are now able to adjust their models and make trading decisions in real time.
One of our client’s data trends, from a specific vendor platform, was a data delivery rate of 250-milliseconds. Initially, the West Highland support team noticed an increase to 500-milliseconds in the delivery and the rate never returned to its normal speed. The data vendor was notified and dispatched the carrier to evaluate the problem. As it turned out, the culprit was a dirty fiber connection. West Highland resumed monitoring and saw an improvement to a 300-millisecond delay, which still did not represent the client’s normal performance. The carrier was dispatched again to clean the fiber, which ultimately returned the data delivery rate to its normal expected speed.
Impact
This type of event would never have been caught by the naked eye and would have continued forever with a 250-millisecond disadvantage over any other competitor, potentially causing the client to pay more for a trade.
