From Jane Street Singals & Threads podcast: Multicast and the Markets about use of multicast in trading exchanges.
here are two kinds of primary data flows that a trading firm encounters, at least when we’re talking to an exchange. There is: the order flow connection, where we send our specific orders and our specific cancels and see the specific responses to those, and that is almost always done on a TCP connection; then there is the receipt of market data, and that’s where you’re sending the data that everyone needs to see exactly the same anonymized stream of data, and that’s almost always done through multicast. (14:37)
... multicast in trading environments is a dominant technology. ...there are a small number of videos that we all want to watch at the same time. Unlike Netflix, where everybody watches a different thing, we actually want in the trading world to all see what’s going on on NASDAQ and ARCA and NYSE and CBOE... (18:49)
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