BSO RF Insight: Faster US Equities Market Data That Works Alongside Your Fiber

When a price moves on one US equities venue, every market maker and high-frequency trading firm wants to know before anyone else does. The firm that sees the change first can pull or reprice its quotes in time. The firm that sees it late often trades against a price that's already out of date. Fiber has served this race well for years, but radio frequency (RF) can carry the same data faster.

BSO RF Insight delivers raw US equities market data over BSO's RF network and hands it to you in your co-located cabinet. It works alongside the fiber you already have and needs very little infrastructure on your side. You can have it live within 48 hours. Below, we look at what faster data is worth and how the service works, and then at how it differs from RF Ultra and RF Express.

What Faster Market Data Is Worth to Market Makers and HFT Firms

Speed in market data shows up directly in how often you get picked off and how much spread you keep. The benefits look a little different depending on your strategy, but the same handful of effects sits behind most of them. Here's where seeing the market sooner pays off:

• Fewer trades against stale quotes, because you can cancel or reprice before toxic flow reaches your resting orders

• Better queue position, since you react to changes and re-establish quotes earlier than slower participants

• Sharper cross-market trading, because you see moves in the lead market sooner and can act before the price gap closes

• Lower hedging costs, since you hedge after a fill using fresher information and lose less to slippage

• Room to quote larger sizes, because you can be more confident your quotes won't be picked off

Market makers tend to value the quote protection most. Avoiding stale-quote adverse selection is the biggest prize for them, and it flows straight into a better realized spread. High-frequency firms care about that too. They also trade on pure reaction time, so cross-venue arbitrage and lead/lag strategies gain the most from an earlier look at the market.

What BSO RF Insight Delivers

The feeds arrive in their native, raw multicast format. Equities trading firms already know these formats, so there's nothing new to parse, and the raw format keeps latency as low as it can be.

RF Insight starts in the New Jersey equities triangle, which covers the exchange data centres in Mahwah, Carteret and Secaucus. This is the biggest concentration of US equities trading activity, and billions of messages such as orders and executions pass through these sites every day. Multi-listed stocks trade across all of the exchanges, so data has to move quickly between the sites for automated strategies to work. BSO already has RF infrastructure in the area, which made it the natural place to begin.

You choose the feeds you need at one or more of the hubs. The menu covers popular feeds from Nasdaq, Cboe, NYSE, MEMX and MIAX, including Nasdaq TotalView-ITCH in both software and FPGA versions. You only take the feeds you actually use.

How RF Insight Works Alongside Your Fiber

Think of RF Insight as a layer that sits next to your fiber, so you don't have to rip anything out to use it. Radio signals travel through air, which gives them a faster route than light passing through glass. Weather can affect an RF link but not buried fiber, so the sensible setup keeps fiber as the dependable base and uses RF for speed. You can read more about why radio frequency matters for modern connectivity on the BSO site.

In practice, your systems can take the fastest copy of the data whenever the RF path is available, while your fiber feed keeps you covered the rest of the time. If you'd like a fiber backup path built into the service itself, BSO offers RF Secure as an option. BSO has been providing RF services for over a decade. It also runs a low-latency fiber network, so you can talk to one provider about both sides of the setup.

Minimal Infrastructure, a 48-Hour Start and a 90-Day Trial

Setup is light. BSO delivers the feeds in their native format to your co-located cabinet over a 10G cross connect, with a Layer 1, 2 or 3 configuration. Your team doesn't have to build or run any RF infrastructure. BSO manages the full data service, and alerts you to any issue with the network.

After you've chosen your feeds and placed your order with BSO, we can turn up these feeds within 48 hours. That means you can start testing in your own environment within days of the first conversation rather than after a long procurement cycle.

There's no long commitment up front either. You sign up for a 90-day trial period, and when it ends you decide whether to keep going. The term can roll over, or you can move to an annual agreement if the service is working for your trading strategy.

How RF Insight Differs From RF Ultra and RF Express

There are now three RF offerings in BSO's RF product portfolio, and they do different jobs. RF Ultra and RF Express carry your own traffic between data centres, while RF Insight brings market data to you. Here's how they compare:

• RF Ultra gives you a dedicated 1.25 Gbps Layer 1 link between two sites and supports any signalling protocol, so it's BSO's premier option for moving your own traffic as fast as possible

• RF Express provides Layer 2 Ethernet that you buy in 50 Mbit/s intervals over a 10G handoff, so it suits low latency uses such as order entry and filtered market data

• RF Insight is a managed market data service. BSO delivers the exchange feeds into your cabinet, and you pick the feeds without buying bandwidth between sites

Plenty of firms will end up using more than one. A firm might run RF Express between two sites for its order traffic and add RF Insight for faster depth data for a handful of key feeds.

Who Should Look at RF Insight

Firms that trade US equities and need to take in data and react quickly are the natural fit. That includes market makers, high-frequency and proprietary trading firms, algo traders, as well as broker-dealers and colocation and technology providers that support them.

If you only use fiber today, it's a low-effort way to see the market sooner. If you already run RF for some of your needs, it can cover select feeds alongside what you have.

Before you start a trial, decide what you'll measure. A useful test compares when the same feed arrives over RF and over fiber, checks how your feed handlers cope with the native format, and watches how the link behaves in poor weather. A 90-day window gives you time to see all of that in your own environment, which is where the numbers matter most.

See RF Insight for Yourself

If faster US equities market data would change how you quote, hedge or trade across venues, RF Insight is worth a trial. Explore RF Insight and BSO's RF solutions to see how it fits your setup, browse BSO's financial markets connectivity, or contact the BSO team to talk through the feeds, hubs and 90-day trial for your firm.