Thai Exchange Rolls Out New Equity Feeds, Preps Derivatives Feeds

The Stock Exchange of Thailand began disseminating a new suite of datafeeds for its equities market earlier this month, following the rollout of a new market data system that will also be extended to cover its derivatives markets, to provide market participants with more data delivery and connectivity options as well as lower-latency data distribution. The moves are part of the exchange’s SET IT Master Plan to improve its data and trading technology to meet demand from both local and global market participants.

The exchange rolled out the new market data system on Monday, Sept. 3—in conjunction with the launch of its new SET Connect trading platform, based on exchange technology provider Cinnober’s TRADExpress platform—initially to distribute data from its equities market, and is now also preparing to migrate its derivatives data to the new system in a second phase scheduled to go live by the end of 2013, says Kirati Kosicharoen, group head of technology products at SET.

The new platform enables SET to provide clients with more choices of how they receive data from the exchange. SET now offers snapshot, real-time streaming and delayed feeds of Level 1 and Level 2 data with five levels of market depth—and may offer more depth or even full depth in future, Kosicharoen says—whereas the exchange’s previous system only provided real-time feeds with either three or five levels of market depth. By providing more options, the exchange can better meet the customers’ data needs, he says.

Furthermore, the new feeds are delivered at “significantly” lower latency, Kosicharoen adds, though he declines to disclose specific latency figures for the feeds.

Encouraging Global Access
SET’s previous feeds were based on a proprietary protocol developed by the exchange, whereas the new system disseminates feeds based on the industry standard FIX protocol as well as Cinnober’s proprietary EMAPI protocol, and allows clients to subscribe to the data either via direct connections or third-party data providers.

“We expect that an industry standard protocol like FIX will reduce the effort [required by] global participants to access our system,” Kosicharoen says, adding that the exchange is also exploring collaborations with global network service providers to make it easier for international trading firms to connect to its markets and access its data.

The exchange has already retired its legacy equity feeds, and will phase out the current derivatives feed by the time the exchange fully migrates to the new system next year.

The enhancements to the exchange’s data and trading infrastructure are intended to “support more trading activities and algorithmic trading, as well as high-frequency trading, from both local and international participants, and to increase SET’s competitiveness with other exchanges,” Kosicharoen says.