Sebi to bourses: Give mkt participants access to data fairly

Regulator Sebi today asked stock exchanges to formulate a comprehensive policy document for providing bourse-related data to market participants in a fair and transparent manner.
The move comes amid concerns over National Stock Exchange (NSE) allegedly giving preferential access to its co-location servers for algorithmic trading to some stock brokers.
In a circular, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) asked stock exchanges to ensure that appropriate tools are deployed so as to monitor service quality of data feeds.
In order to ensure consistent response time to all market participants, exchanges would have to need to ensure that appropriate mechanism (load balancers and randomizers) should be put in place for managing load across systems disseminating data, Sebi noted.

The regulator said that all communication to the market participants, especially on all technology related matters such as monitoring tool, load balancer and randomisation should be abundantly clear and precise providing all necessary details related to concerned facility.
This details include information on features, benefits and risks particularly for participants who have opted for colocation facility.
"Stock exchanges shall formulate a comprehensive policy document for providing stock market related data to the market participants in a fair and transparent manner, irrespective of the type of mechanism used by the stock exchanges for broadcasting of data," Sebi said.
The decision has been taken in consultation with the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) of Sebi. The committee had reviewed the market data feed mechanism of the stock exchanges.