Last month, the New York Stock Exchange purchased market data specialists Wombat Financial Software for $200 million in cash consideration. The move lets the Big Board enhance its trading and connectivity infrastructure, as well as catch up to its competitors’ market data delivery capabilities.
The NYSE planned to integrate Wombat’s low-latency market data feed for quoting and trading activity within technology the exchange group uses to route order flow to other exchanges. “We had the network through [our Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure],” said NYSE Euronext’s Larry Leibowitz. “And we had the content because we sell our market data. But we didn’t have the piece in the middle that puts together the content and distributes it on the platform.”
Wombat should endow the Big Board’s market data offering with the speed to compete with other exchanges for algorithmic traders’ business. The NYSE’s order process and distribution of market data have been relatively slow, compared to peers such as the DirectEdge and BATS ECNs, according to Carl Carrie, global head of algorithmic products and Neovest at JPMorgan. The Wombat deal, he noted, should rectify this.
