Click any participant to explore their role, connections, data flows, and regulatory obligations. Built for market data professionals.
When an investor places an order to buy 100 shares of Apple, that order travels from their broker through a smart order router that checks prices across all 16 US equity exchanges simultaneously. The router finds the best available price — the National Best Bid and Offer, or NBBO — calculated by the SIP from quotes streaming from every exchange. The trade executes in microseconds, clears through DTCC, and settles in one business day.
Every quote and trade generates market data. Exchanges send their data to the SIP for consolidation and directly to subscribers via proprietary feeds. Market data vendors normalize and redistribute this data to thousands of end consumers — trading desks, risk systems, compliance platforms, and retail applications. The market data infrastructure is invisible to most investors but essential to every trade.
The SEC oversees the entire ecosystem through Regulation NMS, which mandates the SIP, requires best execution, and governs market data access and pricing. FINRA regulates broker-dealers and operates critical data infrastructure including CAT and TRACE. The CFTC oversees derivatives markets separately. Every participant in the ecosystem has regulatory obligations that generate their own data flows.