Every time a stock trades or a quote is updated on any US exchange, that information travels through a system called the Securities Information Processor — or SIP.
There are two SIPs for US equities. The CTA SIP handles Tape A and Tape B securities — stocks listed on NYSE and the regional exchanges. The UTP SIP handles Tape C — stocks listed on Nasdaq. Together they cover every NMS stock traded in the US.
The job of the SIP is consolidation. Seventeen exchanges all quote and trade the same stocks simultaneously. The SIP takes all of those quotes, finds the best bid and best offer across all venues, and publishes that as the NBBO — the National Best Bid and Offer. Every broker-dealer in the US is required to consider the NBBO when routing customer orders.
The SIP is why a retail investor at Fidelity gets the same consolidated price as a hedge fund on a co-located server. It is the great equalizer of US market structure — mandated by Regulation NMS, governed by NMS Plans, and operated by exchange consortiums under SEC oversight.
The CTA SIP is operated by NYSE/ICE. The UTP SIP is operated by Nasdaq. Both are governed by their respective NMS Plans — the CTA/CQ Plans and the UTP Plan — which set the rules for how data is collected, processed, and distributed.
Options market data is a different beast from equities. There are over 1.4 million individual options contracts across thousands of underlying securities — each with its own bid, ask, last sale, and Greeks. When markets move, every one of those contracts updates simultaneously.
OPRA — the Options Price Reporting Authority — is the SIP for US equity options. It consolidates last sale and quotation data from all 16 US options exchanges and disseminates it as a single feed.
The volume is staggering. OPRA regularly exceeds 100 billion messages per day during active markets — making it the highest-volume market data feed in the United States by a wide margin. On volatile days around earnings or major macro events, that number goes higher.
The infrastructure requirements reflect this. OPRA uses a 96-line multicast architecture — meaning the feed is split across 96 separate multicast channels that firms subscribe to selectively. A firm that only trades SPY options does not need to receive data for every single-name option. This selectivity is essential — no single network connection could handle the full OPRA feed.
OPRA recently completed an expansion from 48 to 96 multicast lines. This was a major infrastructure project affecting every firm that receives options data — feed handlers had to be updated, network configurations changed, and capacity expanded.
OPRA is governed by the OPRA Plan — an NMS Plan administered by a committee of the participating options exchanges. NYSE Technologies acts as the plan processor, operating the technical infrastructure that receives data from all 16 exchanges and distributes it.
Futures market data is fundamentally different from equity data. There is no consolidation layer — no SIP, no NBBO. Each exchange publishes its own data directly to subscribers.
CME Group — which operates CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX — is the dominant futures exchange in the world. Their market data feed is called MDP 3.0, the Market Data Platform version 3.0. It delivers full order book depth, trades, and settlement data for every futures and options contract across all four CME exchanges.
MDP 3.0 uses multicast delivery, organized into channel groups by asset class. Equity index futures like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 are on different channels than agricultural futures like corn, wheat, and soybeans. A firm that only trades agricultural commodities does not receive equity index data and vice versa.
The bandwidth requirements are significant. In March 2026 CME deprecated support for 1Gbps connections for MDP 3.0 multicast data — the feed regularly exceeds 1Gbps during active markets. Firms receiving multicast data now require 10Gbps connections. Unicast services like iLink order entry and Drop Copy remain supported on 1Gbps.
CME Group is in the process of migrating infrastructure to Google Cloud. A private Google Cloud Chicago region and a new Dallas sandbox environment are part of a multi-year migration. Clients will eventually be able to connect to CME market data from cloud environments — a significant shift from the traditional co-location model.
Agricultural futures data — corn, wheat, soybeans, livestock, dairy — flows through the CBOT channels of MDP 3.0. These are particularly important for commodity trading firms, agricultural banks, and food manufacturers who use futures data to price physical commodities and manage risk.
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