Today, Thomson Reuters said it’s teaming up with Canada’s Alpha Group, operator of Canadian Alpha ATS, an alternative trading systems for Canadian-listed securities, to provide an independent consolidated tape and hosted direct feeds. Thomson Reuters will leverage Alpha’s expertise in the Canadian markets and Alpha’s technology facilities, notes the release.

The new suite of services will allow traders to see share prices offered across the various exchanges and alternative trading facilities in Canada, including Alpha ATS, Pure, Chi-X and the TMX Group. The consolidated data offering will bring together order and trade data from the various Canadian equity marketplaces, and will include access to pre-and post-trade market data.

Thomson Reuters feed handlers will be placed adjacent to most information sources including Alpha Trading Systems, which is to provide market data access at the lowest possibility latency. Clients will have access to all best bid-and-offer data from and across all contributing marketplaces. They also will see full order-book access attributed by dealer and marketplace. In addition, Thomson Reuters offering will include time and sales data from the sources.

“Access to adequate consolidated market data is an issue of major concern in the Canadian marketplace. Without it, market participants cannot discover and exploit the best trading opportunities,” commented Jos Schmitt, CEO of the Alpha Group. But Alpha Group has apparently worked together with Thomson Reuters to put together a consolidated feed that addresses “the key concerns around cost, reliability, low-latency and quality,” according to Schmitt.

“In today’s evolving market, accessing a complete real-time view of liquidity is a challenge. This is a significant breakthrough for the Canadian marketplace, delivering a consolidated view of liquidity across multiple venues, enabling each individual trader to operate with absolute confidence that they are trading at optimum levels for their clients,” stated John Robson, president of Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, in the release.

Meanwhile, yesterday, Spry Ware, the Chicago-based provider of ultra low latency feed handlers and direct market data technology, announced the release of new feed handlers for the direct ARCABook for Options and ARCABook for Complex Options feeds. Also, Spry Ware is developing new feed handlers for the ISE Depth of Market Feed and ISE Top of Book Feed for an upcoming release later in the fourth quarter.

Interestingly, the new feed handlers offer Spry Ware clients an alternative to the Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) for processing options data. Unlike OPRA, the ARCA and ISE feeds are direct feeds, making it possible to get options prices with lower latency than the consolidated OPRA feed, according to Spry Ware’s announcement.

So, while in the case of Canadian equities we’re seeing a push to provide a consolidated data feed from all the various Canadian equity ATS and marketplaces, in the options world, traders already have the consolidated feed and want specialized, direct feeds from each venue.

“We’re seeing a growing trend to source the options feeds directly,” said Dan Curry, director of sales from Spry Ware in the release. Options exchanges are very interested in providing their own specialized feeds, according to Curry. “We already process the entire OPRA feed on a very small hardware footprint, so it was natural to add these new direct feeds to our platform,” continued Curry in the release.